The Daily Stoic - No One is Truly “Self-Made” | The Philosophy Behind High Achievers

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

The myth of the self-made man is just that, a myth. There has never been such a thing.🎥 Check out the Arnold Schwarzenegger episode:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBQlSMOVTAg📚 Pick up a copy of Arnold Schwarzenegger's book Be Useful: Seven Tools For Life at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/👉 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/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them. to follow in their example and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystileck.com. everything in a shipwreck, Zeno washed up in Athens and walked into a bookstore, where the bookseller happened to be reading dialogues from Socrates. Thus introduced to philosophy, he would go on

to become one of the most well-known and well-respected thinkers of his time, advising princes and kings in a generation of Greeks. That school, founded on the Stoopochile, would become Stoicism, a philosophy which endures to this day. On the surface, Zeno's story is extraordinary. Born as an upper-class wealthy merchant, he was forced to start over, build himself up from scratch, becoming truly a self-made man. But this is misleading, as most success narratives are, because Zeno would not have become Zeno without meeting Cretes, a teacher nicknamed the door opener for what he did for so many students. Indeed, there is no great man or woman whose story does not involve being helped, guided, and inspired by other great men and women. There would be no Epictetus, as he studied

under Musonius Rufus. There would be no Seneca without Adelis, no Chrysippus without Cleanthes, and no Cleanthes without Zeno. Why do you think Marcus Aurelius opens meditations with a list of the 17 influential figures who taught him, nurtured him, inspired him, helped him. When I talked to Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Daily Stoad podcast, he talked about this very idea, and in fact he references how inspired he was by meditations in the final chapter of his fantastic book, be useful. surface, Arnold seems like the ultimate example of the idea of the self-made man. He was born and raised in a small village in Austria, and seemingly by his own sheer effort and determination, Arnold achieved extraordinary success in bodybuilding, acting, business, and politics. But as he told

me, he didn't do it on his own. I have been a creation of hundreds of people, he said, thousands of people. It's unbelievable the amount of people that help me and push me, he said. We are all in debt, as we've talked about here, the Daily Stoic. We are all the sum of the debts and lessons, as book one of Meditations is titled. We accumulate from countless people who shape our lives. We are the product of our influences, our environments, our family, and our friends. Success is a collaborative effort, and the myth of the self-made man is just that. A myth.

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And I'll admit it sneaks up on us, especially as the competition gets more and more. The holidays are here. And if you're looking for holiday decor or last minute, around the house, get what you need fast with Wayfair. That's where we got a bunch of our Christmas decorations and a bunch of essentials because we have some of my wife's family visiting us for the holidays, blankets, linens, all that kind of stuff. You can get all of it at Wayfair. You can also get big stuff like sofas and dining tables, beds, desks, and more all shipped for free. They don't have huge delivery fees for furniture. Find all your must-havs from furniture and decor to appliances and

cookware all in one convenient place. Get last minute hosting a essentials, gifts for all your loved ones, and decor to celebrate the holidays for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com, Wayfair, every style, every home. It's sort of a surprising secret weapon, but it is. It's a secret weapon being talked about in corporate boardrooms and on military bases, locker rooms of professional sports teams, hedge funds, world-changing NGO, Stoicism is a thing that some of the best organizations and institutions in the world are using to be better at what they do.

I know this because I'm one of the people that goes and talks to him about it. I'm Ryan Holliday, the best-selling author of The Daily Stoic and many other books, and I've had the honor of being in the rooms with some pretty incredible people, from professional athletes to C-suite executives, world leaders, and even gave a talk at the White House. And in this video, I'm going to share some of the things that I share with those people. Stories I've told in my talks about Stoic philosophy, and I hope you like it. And look, most of the talks that I do, the public can't come to me. But if you want to come hear me talk about Stoic Philosophy in person,

I do have a few shows coming up, and you can click the link in the description below, or just go to Daily Stoiclive.com to find a city near you. Stoicism is not a recipe for being a better sociopath. It is a philosophy built around the common good. It's interesting. I feel like if you asked someone who is vaguely familiar with stoicism, they said, you know, do you know about the stoic circles of concern? They would go, oh yeah, that's your only concern with what's in your control.

They're confusing that with the dichotomy of control. The dichotomy of control is there's some stuff that's not up to us, and then there's this tiny little bit that's up to us. The circles of concern is a much more beautiful, much more powerful idea, which comes to us from Hierocles, a little-known stoic, who said that we exist in a series of concentric circles, which we are the center of. Yes, we love ourselves, but we come to love our parents who took care of us. We come to love our spouse or our children. We love our fellow citizens. We love our neighboring countries. bigger and bigger groups of people.

And you could expand these circles outwards to include animals, to include the planet, to include unborn future generations. Hierocles says that the work of philosophy, growth as a human being, is about being able to expand those circles or to bring those outer circles inwards, to care about people that you've never met,

to care about people who have never been born. You don't control them, control them, sure, but you care about having a positive impact on them. Wisdom isn't something anyone can give us. We have to earn it to do the work. That's what I think so interesting about AI. People are talking about what it's going to replace, you know, that it's the sum total of all human knowledge, except you still have to interpret what it spits out. I was working on something on the wisdom book, which I was just finishing, and there was a quote that I, you know, as I read, I take all these notes and I forgot to say where I'd gotten a quote

from. I'd marked that it was a quote, but I wanted to check who was from. I asked ChatGBT, I said, where is this quote from Lincoln come from? And it said, oh, that's actually not a quote about Lincoln. It said, that's Mark Twain talking about Charles Dickens or something like that. I said, I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's about Lincoln. And said, oh, yeah, you're totally right. That's Tolstoy talking about Lincoln. And I thought, oh, no, I'm, I'm, I don't. I just read Tolstoy's very famous meditation on Lincoln and I knew it wasn't in there and I said I'm pretty sure it's not I think it's from his secretary John Hay and it says oh yes you're totally right it's from secretary John Hay and I said really can you prove it where's it from and it said

oh it's in book 11 of their biography of Lincoln and I pulled up book 11 and it was about something totally different where this quote wouldn't have been I said no it's not and it said you're right. It's not. But they said something very similar. And what I really, what struck me is, sure, this is the sum total of all human wisdom. But it also is trying to tell me what it thinks I want to hear, right? It can't say I don't know. It can't say that I'm confused. It's trying to fool me so I will leave it alone, right? And so even this incredible tool, and I had no problem with tools. I prefer a lot of analog things, but I'm always interested in how new tools can help you and make you better. What struck me about this is, oh, still even wisdom, intelligence,

skill, insight, the ability to communicate, all the sort of things that go into wisdom, experience, intuition. I just had a sense of where this quote was coming from. Without this, I would have been fooled one or two or three or four different times. And so even now with this magical thing at our fingertips, without a strong base of experience, a strong sense of historical knowledge, without an ability to spot bullshit, you're gonna get eaten alive.

I lost my copy of meditations on the flight here. I left them on the plane, one I'd had for several years. That's how it goes. There's a funny Epictita story. He has this lamp in his house. It's his prized lamp and this shrine that he has. And he wakes up one evening and he hears someone in his house. A thief is broken in and they steal it. And he says to himself, you can only lose what you have. And the next day he goes and he buys a cheaper one. To him, it was a reminder about why we can't cling to possessions, take them too seriously. Thankfully, I publish my own edition, so I have an endless supply. But...

I did lose all my notes, which I'm pretty upset about. Not my original copy. I don't travel with that one for precisely that reason. I'll lose it someday, I'm sure. I could go up in a fire or whatever. That's Epictetus's lesson from that. But we're told that after his death, a fan buys the wooden lamp for a small fortune

as a reminder of the power of the philosophy, thus missing the whole point of the lamp to Epictetus. Stoicism was what partly inspired me to drop out of college. It's partly what inspired me to quit my marketing and business career. It was scary. I didn't know if it would work, but stoicism is a philosophy around logic. Part of how it helps you through hard things is it walks you through the costs and the benefits. It tells you that life is scary and that a life without risk is impossible and that you've

got to be brave enough to meet it. It says look back at earlier parts of your life. Look at your life as a whole. How did you get where you were? By taking risks, by doing things. Everything that's good in our life is on the other side of some courageous decisions, sometimes minor, sometimes major,

the courage to talk to someone, the courage to go out for something, to raise your hand for something, the courage to try something, the courage to speak up about something, courage to quit something that wasn't working, to reject the status quo in the hope of a better future. Marcus says that everything is a chance to practice virtue.

What does he mean? Virtue is a hard word, I think. People see it as self-righteousness. They associate it with virtue signaling, or they associated with this religion or that religion. But for the Stoics, virtue was not one thing, but actually four things. And to look at those four-stroke virtues, we have to go back to the founding of Stoicism,

which itself came out of disaster. Zeno is a merchant. In the Mediterranean in the 4th century, he's a dealer in what's called Tyrion purple. It's this exclusive and incredibly rare purple dye that would make the garments of the wealthiest and fanciest Greeks. And later, when Marcus would assume the purple become the emperor, that's what they were referring to. He would wear the purple cloak of Roman royalty. Zeno is traveling with his convoy of ships through the Mediterranean when he encounters a storm or pirates or runs aground. and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens penniless,

and he ends up in a bookstore. And there, hearing the works of Socrates read aloud, having a conversation with the dead, fulfilling a prophecy from the oracle at Delphi, he is introduced to philosophy. He would say later that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because it drove him to philosophy. He would set up a philosophical school on the Stoa Pokele, the painted porch, which is the name of my bookstore on the Stoa pockylae in the Athenian Agora. That's where the Stoa in Stoicism comes from. He doesn't name the philosophy after himself.

He names it after the school. So the Stoapokule is where Stoicism is brought into the world. And it comes out of this disaster. His great misfortune is actually not just his fortune, but our fortune. Here we are, all of us, influenced by the ideas that this man comes up with nearly 25 centuries. ago. I sometimes struggle with the essential principle of stoicism, which is differentiating

between things that we can control and we cannot. Me too. I mean, it's an entrepreneur, and as an entrepreneur, you need to do your best, but sometimes you need to do a little bit more. It's been fascinating for myself. I love it, but on the other hand, sometimes I think there's a moment where maybe I should get some peace, you know? Yeah.

And I wanna take it back to you when you talked about your book. In this example, you write a book that's under your control and then the marketing and the sales are not, but... But you can have some influence over them. Yes. Yeah, this is the tricky part.

There's two parts. So one, acceptance is a stoic concept that I think a lot of us struggle with because we didn't get where we are by accepting things, right? Like, you didn't accept no, you didn't accept the people who were rooting against you, You didn't accept the odds.

You didn't accept any number of the problems that should have been career killers, company killers. You kept going. And through sheer force of will, you build whatever you build. Then we come up against something and we want to fight it and push against it. But it really is out of our control. It's the weather. It's what somebody else did. So acceptance is just accepting the facts.

And then the part that's in my control is the response. What I tell myself about it and what I do next. So that's kind of how I try to think about acceptance. But yes, the black and whiteness of its inner control and not in your control is tricky if you've done anything like marketing or we're talking about persuading people earlier. You don't control what other people think, but you can give them the tools or say things or present things that might allow them to change their mind. So there's probably a third category, something in the middle, that is like what we have influence over

or what we can nudge. And as long as we accept that it's not fully up to us and that we're making a probabilistic decision here or that's probably a safer way to come at it than, no, I can make people love this. Can't. So every day, totally free, we send out the daily Stoic email. It's the largest community of Stoics

ever assembled in human history. And just one stoic idea, one ancient lesson to chew on every single day. I'd love to have you join us. If you like our videos, I think you'll like the email. It's also a podcast version of it too. You can sign up at daily stoic.com slash email.

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