The Daily Stoic - It's the Little Moments That Make the Big Lessons

Episode Date: October 4, 2020

In today's episode, Ryan reads his recent article about the lessons we can learn from the smallest moments in the lives of the philosophers and scholars who inspire us.Read the article here: https://ryanholiday.net/study/Get Lives of the Stoics: https://dailystoic.com/livesThis episode is brought to you by Amazon Alexa. Amazon Alexa is the perfect system to use to set up your house with Smart Home functionality—and with the new Amazon Smart Lighting Bundle, it’s easy to get started. Just connect your Amazon Echo Dot with your first Sengled color changing light bulb and you’re on your way. Visit Amazon.com/dailystoic to get 20% off the bundle.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more

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I'm excited that lives of the Stokes is now out, but I wanted to sort of get to the key idea behind this book, which we'll get into right now. But it's something I think about a lot. I feel like most of the things that I note down when I read books, when I am doing my marginally, when I'm transferring things from a book, I read to my commonplace book, it's going to be something along the lines of what we're going to talk about today.

Small events, single moment, a simple exchange, an unremarkable decision, this is what changes the world. today. Small events, a single moment, a simple exchange and unremarkable decision. This is what changes the world. On a fateful day in the 4th century BC, after a disastrous voyage on the Mediterranean, a merchant named Zeno washed up peniless and Athens. He could have dispaired. Instead, he studied philosophy and ended up founding the School of Stoicism. I made a prosperous voyage, he would later say, when I suffered a shipwreck. In the first century BCE, Pompey tried to corrupt Marcus Porsche's Cato by dangling a marriage alliance.

Go and tell Pompey, Cato said, that Cato is not to be captured by the way of women's apartments. A few years later, his daughter collaborating in an attempt to overthrow Julius Caesar would stab herself in the leg to test her ability to withstand torture, able to successfully bear the pain she and her husband Brutus went ahead with the conspiracy. Several generations would pass and eventually place Marcus Arelius at the head of the Roman Empire, a friend stopped Marcus as he was leaving his home one morning. Where are you going?" He said to handle business. No. Marcus was on his way to attend a philosophy lecture. Learning is a good thing, even for one who is growing old, Marcus said, from sex to the philosopher, I shall learn that,

which I do not yet know. These little moments, these are insights into the lives of what made the greats. Great. This, the great moral biographer, Plutarch would say, is why you often learn more from a single anecdote than a sweeping historical portrait. Unlike the biographers of our time who published big, thick books published with footnotes and postmodern digressions, Plutarch included only the essence of great man and women so that he might inspire us to follow in their footsteps. He was obsessed by what we could learn

from the figures he wrote about. It's not histories I am writing, Plutarch would say, but lives. And in the most glorious deeds, there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands die.

This distinction is core to stoicism. Study the philosopher, they said, not the philosophy. Unlike the so-called pen and ink philosophers, as the type was known even two thousand years ago, the stoic said to pay not so much attention to what philosophers had thought are written, because what counts is what they do. The choices they made, the causes they served, the principles they adhered to in the face of adversity. They cared about what you did, not what you said. Don't talk about your philosophy, Epictetus, would say embody it.

And that's why he would become so frustrated with his students who congratulated themselves on being able to read the obscure writings of Cricipus. They were missing the point. Philosophy wasn't about big words or complicated texts. It was about applying concepts to the real world, it was about living a happy and resilient and purposeful life. I know Sennaka wrote in a book on Mercy written for the young Emperor Nero that the stillcs have a bad reputation among the uninformed

for being to callous and therefore unlikely to give good advice to kings and princes. They're blamed for asserting that the wise man does not feel pity and does not forgive. In fact, no philosophical school is kindler and gentler. Nor more loving of humankind and more attentive to the common good, to the degree that its very purpose is to be useful, bring assistance, and consider the interest not only of itself as a school, but of all people, individually and collectively.

And of course, this is the model that I tried to base lives of the Stoics on. We wanted to pour over the ancient texts and modern scarveship to bring you not necessarily biographies of the figures, but lives. We had an eye on practical application and advice we wanted to leave the reader not only with facts and figures but a fuller sense of the essence, the aspects of their lives that teach us the most about

the art of living because this is what I focus on when I read. The only reason to study philosophy it's to be a better person. Anything else in nature would say is merely a critique of words by means of other words, empty talk, show up and how we're called this fencing in the mirror. This, unfortunately, though, is the role that philosophy plays for many people in the modern world. Today, it's about what smart people say, what big words they use, what paradoxes and riddles they can baffle us with.

And no wonder we dismiss it as impractical it is. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, through which it would say. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. That's what the Stoics were after, what we remain interested into this day. Lights to illuminate the path. They wanted to know, as we want to know, how to find tranquility, purpose, self-control, and happiness. And that journey, whether it begins in ancient Greece or modern America, is timeless. It's essential. It's difficult.

Which is why we ask as the Stoics ask, who can help me? What is right? What is true North? You've wandered all over Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in meditations and finally realized that you never found what you were after, how to live, not in syllogisms, not in money or fame or self-indulgence, nowhere.

If philosophy is anything, it's an answer to that question, how to live. It's what we've been looking for. Would you ask what philosophy offers to humanity? Santa Cah asks in letters of a stoic, philosophy offers counsel. Santa Cah would say that this was the most powerful lesson he learned from his childhood tutor, Adilis, the stoic,

that the purpose of studying philosophy, of reading about the great men and women who lived and died before us, of learning about the simple question that Xeno asked, the small decision that Cato made, that one passage that guided Marcus, what Seneca said he learned from analysts, was to take away from him one good thing every day that he should return home a sounder man, or on the way to becoming sounder. We must heed this council and struggle with what Santa could describe as our most important job, the act of turning words into works in the real world, to study the lives of the men and women who came before us. The same reason that Plutarch did, and he wrote about the Stokes too,

he wanted to turn the lessons of their lives, their living and their dying, their succeeding and their failings, and actions in the real world. Ford is this and nothing else that earns one the title, philosopher. So again, that's why I read so many biographies, that's why I love obituaries, that's why I love even podcasts. I love hearing these anecdotes and I feel like the commonplace book that I keep even the note cards that I create and then the books that I write are built around these anecdotes. I'm collecting these stories, these quips, these quotes, these little ideas because then I can

incorporate and build on them, not just in my writing, although that's where I use them professionally, and build on them, not just in my writing, although that's where I use them professionally, but it's so I can use them in my life, so I can think about how they responded. And and this is really an ancient idea. I mean, it's funny when you study Cato, for instance, and then you study the American Revolution, you realize a lot of these famous lines in the American Revolution give me liberty, give me death. I regret I only have one life to lose my country. and Revolution, give me liberty, give me death. I regret I only have one life to lose my country. These were quips from Cato that the founders had heard in plays or in books and they were reusing. And so there's a reason we collect this information while we look at these little moments because it turns out they actually teach big, big lessons. And

that's what I wanted to remind you about today. Maybe the little quips from Zeno about how he took a prosperous voyage when he suffered a shipwreck or markets are really just about going off and learning that, which he does not yet know. Maybe that will stick with you or maybe just the distinction from Plutarch about the difference between biography and life that will stay with you or maybe the idea of a commonplace will stick with you. I don't know, but the idea is we look with these little things. And Asa Naka says, if we just get one every day, it adds up to something really special and really meaningful.

So that's the idea. If you haven't checked out lives of the Stokes yet, I hope you do. It's out in stores everywhere, getting a great response from people. I appreciate it. Lives of the Stokes, the art of living from Xeno to Marcus Relius, Check it out. We'll talk soon.

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