The Daily Stoic - 50 Stoic Rules to Live By

Episode Date: September 30, 2026

The Stoics wrote about almost every part of life, but which of their ideas are worth carrying with you every day? In this episode, Ryan shares 50 short rules from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and other Stoics that you can actually put into practice.🏛 Stoic reminders to carry with you: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are.--Wealthfront’s high-yield cash account: https://www.wealthfront.com/stoicThis experience may not be representative of other Wealthfront clients, and there is no guarantee of future performance or success. Experiences will vary. Ryan Holiday, who’s a client of Wealthfront, receives cash compensation from Wealthfront Brokerage for paid testimonials in his podcast, creating a conflict of interest. More details available via the referral link. The Direct Deposit Plus Investing Program from Wealthfront Advisers LLC and Wealthfront Brokerage LLC provides eligible clients a 0.25% APY increase above the base APY on eligible Cash Account balances (up to an overall boosted rate of 4.30% for a limited time when including the three month 0.75% APY boost for new clients) when you direct deposit $1,000 a month, plus open, fund, and maintain an investing account. Wealthfront may change or end the program at any time and determine eligibility at its discretion. Terms apply. Full details at wealthfront.com/promo-terms.The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of January 30, 2026, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. References to the APY for the Wealthfront Cash Account, including any APY increase, are to the APY paid by insured depository institutions that participate in our cash sweep program (the "Program Banks”). Wealthfront Brokerage does not pay interest. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY.Instant and same-day withdrawals use the Real-Time Payments (RTP) network or FedNow service. Transfers may be limited by your receiving institution, daily caps, or participating entities. New Cash Account deposits have a 2–4 day hold before transfer. Wealthfront does not charge fees for these services, but receiving institutions may impose an RTP or FedNow Fee. Processing times may vary.. Fees & Eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features.Investment advisory services are provided by Wealthfront Advisers LLC, an SEC-registered investment adviser. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Securities investments are not bank deposits, bank-guaranteed or FDIC-insured, and may lose value. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This comes to us from Epictetus. He says it's the chief task of life, which is focus on what you control. Is it up to me? Is it not up to me? If it is up to you, it gets 100%. If it's not up to me, it gets 0%. We focus on what we control because that's where our energy, effort, and emotions actually make a difference. The next one is related to the first one, which is we control how we respond to things.

As Epictita says, we don't control what happens, but we control how we respond to what happens. So by ignoring all the things that are not up to us, by refraining from regret or complaint or blame and focusing on this happened, what am I going to do about it, this is how we move forward, and this is what all great leaders, artists, human beings do.

They focus on the world. what they control and what the control is how they respond to what happens in life. The next is a question for Marks to realize. He says, ask yourself in every moment, is this essential? Because the truth is, most of what we do, most of what we spend time on, most of the things that other people do and spend time on are not essential. And he says when you eliminate what's in essential, you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Do I need to do it yes or no, and if I do need to do it, then because it is essential, I'm going to give it everything I have. Are you meditating on your mortality? I carry a coin in my pocket that says memento

mori. You can leave life right now. Marks really says life is short. Don't waste time. Don't focus on things that don't matter. Going through our life with a clear sense of our mortality is essential. Value time more than money and possessions, right? You can earn more money, you can get more land, you can get more opportunities. What you can't get is this moment back. Seneca says the time that passes belongs to death. So don't think of death is something in the future. Think of death as something that's happening right now. And everything you do, you are choosing to purchase with your life. You have to remember you're a product of your habits. Epictetus says, if you want to be beautiful, make beautiful choices. If you want to be excellent, make excellent

choices. Make them habitually. Day in and day out. They add up. It's easy to get upset by things, which is why the Stoics say that we have the power to have no opinion. You can just think nothing about something. If you didn't know it existed, you wouldn't have an opinion. Now that you know it exists, great. But you don't have to say it's positive, it's negative. You don't have to say it's anything. It just is.

Seeing things objectively, withdrawing judgments from them is really important. As Epictetus says, it's not things that upset us. It's our opinion about things. We control our opinions. Well begun is half done, as they say. So own the morning. If you want to have a good day, have a good morning. If you want to have a good life, have a good day.

So it all comes back to how you start the day. Own the morning. It's a great passage of Marcus Reelis where he's arguing with himself about getting up at a bed in the morning. And he says, look, were you meant to huddle under the covers and stay warm? He says, no, get to work. Do what you got to do. Do what you were put here on this earth to do and do it early. Seneca's rule was put the day up for review. Ask yourself, what could I have done better? Where did I fall short? Who do I want to be? Was I being that person? So every day the law is put your day up for review, evaluate yourself, interrogate yourself. That's how you get better. Seneca says we suffer more in imagination than reality, and that gives us the next law, which is don't suffer imagined troubles. The stuff that you're worried about, it'll happen or it won't. Worrying doesn't affect it, right? So, so

So Seneca says, don't feel more than you have to. Deal with that when it comes. For now, focus on what's in front of you. Focus on what you need to do. Don't add to your suffering by anticipating it by suffering in advance. That's only adding cumulatively up to more suffering. You got to see the good in people. That's an important law. Yes, the stokes were pragmatists. Yes, they were realistic. They were even a bit pessimistic. But Marcus Aurelius famously tried to get the most out of people. He tried to see the good in them. He knew, yes, there's a certain amount of bad people out there, but he always tried to find something good in everyone he was dealing with. If you don't do this, you're going to be miserable and unhappy. Marcus really didn't want to be emperor. So it's interesting

that in meditation, he gives this rule to himself. He says, never be overheard complaining, not even to yourself. Complaints are for losers. Complaints solve nothing. Focus on what you're going to do. Focus on the good in a situation. Don't allow yourself to complain. Zeno gives us this rule, two ears, one mouth for a reason, always listen more than you talk. There's always something you can do. We've talked about this earlier. It's focus on the response. There's always something you can do.

Some way to move forward, some little bit of progress that you can make. Zeno says well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. So start small focus on the little thing you can do in this situation. Marcus Reelis talks about envy, right? Data Roosevelt says that comparison is the thief of joy. Comparing yourself to other people is focusing on something you don't control. It never makes you feel good. It either makes you feel egotistical or makes you feel crappy.

Only focus on what you do. Don't compare yourself to other people. Hold yourself to your own standards as Cato did that are higher than other people. So when you're succeeding, you focus on how much further you have to go. And when you're failing, you ask yourself, did I live up to my own standards? That's what matters. Live as if you have done. and come back to life. Seneca says that if you go to bed every night saying,

my life is over, I've lived my life, I went through it all, then when you wake up in the morning, it's extra. Anyone who's been to a casino knows it's more fun when you're playing with house money. Mark Shriver says the best revenge is not to be like that, right? People are going to be awful, people are going to do bad things. How do you get even? How do you prove what a good person should be like? By being a good person, by being the opposite of those people. The best way to beat a cheater, as I say, and the boy who would be came is to not be like one. Yes, the Stoics had high standards. Yes, they worked very hard, but they had this rule be tolerant with others, strict with yourself. Kato says, I can forgive any error but my own. It's called

self-discipline. It's what you ask of yourself, what other people say or do, the mistakes they make, leave it to them. Put every single impression you have to the test, right? We have. We have our initial reactions the Stoics say, our initial impressions, our snap judgment. Great, maybe you're right, but you also could be wrong. So take a minute, pause between the stimulus and the response, as Victor Frankel famously says, wait a second, choose who you're going to be, choose what you want to feel, choose what you want to do. Don't just react emotionally, put every impression, every impulse to the test. You can learn something from everyone. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, everyone I meet is better than me at something and in that I want to learn from them, right?

So focus on what you can learn from every single person, even people you don't like, even people you don't respect, even people who suck. Focus on what you can learn because everyone is better than you at something. And even if they're not better than you at something, you can learn from them in the cautionary tale. So you can learn from everyone. We always want to be learning. That's where wisdom comes from. Outcomes are not in our control, process, and effort. is. So the Stoics say focus on effort, not outcomes. Ignore the results, focus on what's in front of you.

I have to do this with my books. I want to write the best book possible. I want to try as hard as I can on the marketing. I want to do the absolute best I can. Everything after that is extra. It's not up to me. Success is internal. Did I do what I set out to do? Everything else is irrelevant. Define what success means to you. Success should be given your best. having impact, really trying, really pushing yourself. What other people say or do is irrelevant. Marks Reyes says we love ourselves, but for some reason we care about other people's opinions

more than our own. No, you have to define what success means to you, not what everyone else says is the most or what everyone else is the most impressive or what everyone else is doing. Set your own standards for success. You'll be much more likely to meet them. You have to find a way to love everything that happens.

This is the Stoicke. idea of amorphati. The Stoics aren't resigned to what happens. It's more than that. They embrace it. They say, this isn't something I have to do. It's something I get to do. This isn't something that happened to me. It's something that happened for me. Mark Serialis says everything you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. That's what the idea of amorphati is. They embrace, they love everything that happens because they know they can use it and they know that it's what destiny had in mind for them. Seek out challenges. Do one thing every day that scares you as the cliche goes.

We become better for what we struggle with, just as the way you have to lift weights to get stronger. Seek out challenges, tackle hard things. Push yourself. If you want to write a mighty book, Ralph Ellison says, choose a mighty theme. Challenge yourself, that's how you get better. Don't run away from challenges, run towards challenges.

Don't follow the mob. Chrysippa says, why would I become a philosopher if I'm just gonna be like everyone else if I'm gonna follow the mob? No, I think for myself. It's the hardest thing in the world. to think for yourself. As Mark Twain says, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, pause and reflect. It's not that they're always wrong. They just sometimes are, and you want to make

sure you're deciding this for yourself, not just because everyone else is saying or doing it. So again, the Stoics, they're not contrarians, but they think independently, and so must you think about everything for yourself. If the mob is excited about it, if the mob is beating up on someone, if the mob is caught up in a fat or a passion or a trend, that's a good sign that you should step back, think for yourself, and do what's actually right, not just what everyone else is doing. Epictetus says that every situation has two handles, and that's where this rule actually adapted from Thomas Jefferson comes from. He says, always grab the smooth handle. Evictita says, one of the handles will hold weight, the other won't. What handle are you going to

grab of this situation, the one that empowers you or disempowers you, the one that makes you angry or gives you something to focus on and change? Right. So every situation, has two handles. Which one are you going to grab? Grab the one that makes you better, that gives you something to do, that challenges you, ignore the other handle. Seneca says every person is an opportunity for kindness, and that's the rule here. Every situation is an opportunity for kindness. Kindness is the key. It's what moves this forward. Never pass up an opportunity to be kind, to care, to be compassionate, to listen, to appreciate what someone is going through, because that's the truth. Everyone is going through something.

You have to say no a lot. This goes back to Mark Surrealis. Is this essential? If it's not essential, what do you do? This is the rule. You say no. You have to say no. When I talk to NFL teams, this is something we talk about. I say, look, everything you say yes to means you're saying no to something else. And whatever you say no to gives you more room, more time to say yes to what matters. In their case, being great at what they do. So what are you going to say no to this year? So you can say yes to the things that matter, to the people that matter in your life as well. You can't be afraid to ask for help. I don't want you to think that the Stokes are invulnerable, that they never show weakness.

In fact, Marx really says, you're like a soldier storming a wall. If you have to reach up and have a comrade help you up, so what? I love that. So what? So don't be afraid to ask for help. I love the book, The Boy, the Fox, the Horse, and the Mole by Charlie Mackenzie, who I had on the Daily Stoic podcast. And he has a great line in that book. He says, asking for help isn't giving up. It's actually refusing to give up. Don't be afraid to be vulnerable. Don't be

afraid to ask for help. Dare greatly, as Bray Brown says, be vulnerable, ask for help. What is the path to wisdom? Seneca says it's finding one thing every day, one quote, one story, one conversation, one book, one insight. That's the idea. You get better one thing at a time. That's actually why we do the Daily Stoic email, right? Every single day we send out a free email inspired by Stoicism to the largest community of Stoics ever in the world. Almost 400,000 people get this email. You can sign up at Daily Stoic.com slash email. But the point is, you got to find something that delivers value for you every day.

You've got to seek it out. One thing that makes you better every day. That's the path to wisdom. We're not in this alone. To do harm to another person, to allow harm to come to another person is to allow harm to come to yourself. So Marcus Reelius says in this rule, what's bad for the hive is bad for the B. The way I think about this is whatever I do say, however I live, I go, what would the world look like if everyone did this, right? And if the answer is things would fall apart, things would be

bad, then it's something I try not to do, right? What's bad for others is bad for me. What's good for me should be good for others. We talked about being tolerant with others, strict with yourself. That means not judging. Seneca says the study of philosophy is about scrubbing off your flaws, not other peoples, right? Leave other people to their own mistakes. Don't judge them, especially people you don't know, especially people who are going through things that you don't know about. Seneca is right. Focus on yourself. Be strict with yourself. Don't judge other people. Leave them to their own struggle. You have to study the lives of the greats. Seneca says, choose yourself a cato. Focus on someone who's going to make you better.

As I say in my book, the lives of the Stilich. We study the lives of the people. We study the lives of the people who went before us so we can learn easily what they learn with great difficulty. So we can pick up where they left off so we don't have to learn by trial and error. Find some heroes, study them, learn from them, learn what to do, but not to do. That's the journey I'm on with Marks, Srealia, Seneca, Epictetus, it's what I write about in Lives of the Stoics. But the idea is whose lives are you studying and what are you learning from them? Forgive, forgive, forgive.

That's this rule. I heard a great expression that forgiveness is a gift that you give to yourself. Marksia says the best revenge is not to be like that. I would add to that is also to not hang on to whatever that was. You got to let go. You got to forgive. Yes, Mark Sevelia says that, you know, someone's cheating in the ring with you when you're boxing. You got to, you got to act accordingly, but you can't hold on to grudges because they make you miserable. As we said before, find one thing a day, but I would also add to this,

make a little bit of progress every day, become 1% better every day that adds up. Zeno says, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. Marks Reilly says, assemble your life action by action. No one can stop you from that. A little bit of progress every day adds up. What is stoicism, but journaling? That's what Meditations is, the journal of the most powerful man in the world. But it's not banal notes about what he had for breakfast and how he worked out.

It's a conversation with himself about how to be better, how to do better, how to become, how to fight to be the person that philosophy wants him to be, as Marcus says. That's what we try to do in the Daily Stoke. Journal 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living. But the point is, sit down with a journal every morning. It's spiritual windshield wipers, as Julia Cameron famously said. Spend some time in the morning with a journal. Have a conversation with yourself.

Do the evening journal too. Seneca talks about putting the day up for review. The point is, have that conversation with yourself. Put it down on the page. And Frank famously says that paper is more patient than people. This morning I was frustrated with something. I sat down with a journal instead of dumping on someone and it made me better. So the idea is journal every single day.

Like Marcus, you can do the Daily Stoke Journal, you can do it on your phone. It doesn't matter, but every day spend a few minutes with a journal. Prepare for life's setbacks. Premeditoshio Malorum, this comes to us from Seneca. It says exile, war, torture, shipwreck. Be ready for them because they're going to happen. And he says, the unforeseen blow lands heaviest.

And by anticipating things, we take power away from them. So be prepared, be ready. Think unpleasant thoughts. So you can be pleasantly surprised that they don't happen, rather than unpleasantly surprised when they do happen. That's what Seneca says. He said, the only unacceptable excuse is I did not think that could happen. One of the really beautiful things in meditations is all the observations

Marcus makes about nature, the flex of foam on a boar's mouth, the way olives fall right from the tree, the way the wheat bends low under its own weight, the furrowed brow of the lion. You know, he found beauty in the mundane, in the everyday life. He talks about the way that bread cracks open in the oven. Where does this come from? Why does it happen? Life can be dark. Life can be frustrating.

It can break your heart. So if you focus on the good in finding beauty everywhere and seeing with the poet's eye, you'll find beauty everywhere. You'll always have something that makes you smile. We talked about how it's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. Another way of expressing this is this rule, which is to do wrong to someone else is to do wrong to yourself. We're all brothers.

We're all one. We're all connected to hurt someone else is to hurt yourself, right? We do good because it's the right thing, but also because it's good for us. Robert Green once said to me, there's two types of time in life, a lifetime, dead time. says, what are you going to choose? You're going to live this moment.

You're going to kill time. You're going to waste time. You're going to let that time die. A stoic always chooses a live time. They focus on what they control. They focus on how they respond. They know that life is short, so they live every moment.

They use every moment put before them because they know that the next one cannot be taken for granted. Associate with people who make you better. You become like your friends. We are a reflection of our surroundings. The Stoics saw. out people that made them better. In fact, Seneca's conversation with Lucilius, who he writes

to in letters from Astilek, is about him associating with someone who made him better. Spend time with people who make you better. I saw a great expression the other day. You can't change your friends, but you can change your friends. Look, this is a time of heightened political correctness of sensitivity, of trigger warnings, and microaggressions. The Stoaks would say, like, look, we don't control what other people do. We control how we respond. That's why Epictetus reminds us that when we are offended, we are complicit in the response. It takes two to tango. Yes, they said it, but you decide that it's rude. You decide that it was mean. You decide that you've been harmed. Choose not to feel harmed by a remark, Marcus really says, and then you won't

feel harm. Fate behaves as she pleases, Seneca says, so act accordingly. Be ready for everything that happens. Understand that it's not in your control and that what goes up must come down. possess nothing in this life. You have to understand this. All our possessions are ours in trust only. Epictetus is robbed of a silver lamp. He says, you can only lose what you have. And the next day, he replaces it with a cheaper lamp. We don't possess our precious possessions. We don't possess our loved ones. They're ours for as long as we have them. And they go away. You don't possess anything. Realize that everything you own is in trust and act accordingly. I think about this with my farm. I heard a great expression.

You don't own your house. You don't own your farm. I don't own mine. The bank just lets me make payments on it. It's not mine, but I can enjoy it while I have it. Seneca says, I at least am not a hindrance to myself, meaning I don't make my problems worse by bemoaning them. We talked about complaining.

Not only is complaining ineffective, it makes you miserable. It poisons the room, poisons the atmosphere. It's a cancer. Don't make your troubles worse by complaining about how bad they are, how unfair they are, how not your fault they are, how impossible they are to overcome. Focus on what you control, focus on the good in them. That's plenty. What goes up must come down. As we said, Marksurelius says, remember to accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. That's the rule. Accept the good things while

they're there. Accept the bad things while they're there. None of them change who you are and what you can do. You want to be good and gracious and resilient in success. You want to be good and gracious and resilience in failure. You want to be humble when you're on high. You want to be humble when life has humbled you, right? Be who you are, be the even keel. Don't let your circumstances change you high or low. All of it is irrelevant to who you are. Don't identify with success or failure. Focus on who you are and what you control. The four virtues of stoicism, I carry a coin in my pocket that says this courage, temperance, justice, wisdom. There is no situation so good, so bad, so strange, so ordinary that it does not

demand these four virtues from us. Act always with courage, act always with moderation, act always in light of fairness and justice and honesty. And of course, you need wisdom to know how and when to do those three other things. Those are the four virtues of stoicism. And then the last three, I actually have tattooed on my body, though, this important to me. The obstacle is the way. There's no problem so bad that there's not something you can't do because of it, that you can't grow because of it, that you can't learn because of it, that it doesn't open some opportunity that otherwise wouldn't have been there. When God shuts a door, he opens a window, right? What are you going to do because of this?

What's the opportunity inside the obstacle? Ego is the enemy. Arrogance always makes things worse. Ego never makes things better. Be humble, be open-minded, be willing to learn. Don't be above or beneath anything. be who you are, be confident, of course, but believe in yourself because there's evidence, not because you think you're better than everyone else. Stillness is the key. The secret to charging ahead is slowing down, seeing things clearly. My best work never comes when I'm doing 50 things at the same time.

Marks really talks about how we want to be the rock that the waves are crashing over and eventually fall still around. Can you tune out what's happening outside? Can you tune out the crowd? Can you hit the game-winning shot? Can you focus on what you need to focus on? Can you see things clearly without the bias and the immediacy of the moment?

That's why stillness is so important. That's why the Stoics talk about it over and over again and why it's such an important rule of life. I'll leave you with one last rule, the most important rule in all of Stoicism, which is that you don't talk about your philosophy, Epic Tetus says, you embody it. I have a print on my wall right there for Marcus Rialius.

He says, waste no more time arguing what a good man is like, just be one. All these rules are well and good as far as they go, but what matters is if you live them, if you apply them day to day, they're simple. I know that, but they're not easy, and I know that too. It's hard to apply them, but every day, as we said, you want to make a little bit of progress,

get a little bit better at living these ideas. That's the purpose of Stoicism.