The Daily Stoic - Redesign Your Life With This | Ryan Holiday Live in Sydney, Australia

Episode Date: February 9, 2025

Join Ryan Holiday for an in-depth dive into Stoic wisdom, delivered to a packed audience at Sydney Town Hall in Australia.🎥 Watch this talk on YouTube here🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. When I travel with my family, I almost always stay in an Airbnb. I want my kids to have their own room. I want my wife and I to have a little privacy. You know, maybe we'll cook or at the very least we'll use a refrigerator. Sometimes I'm bringing my in-laws around with me or I need an extra room just to write in. Airbnbs give you the flavor of actually being in the place you are. I feel like I've lived in all these places that I've stayed for a week or two or even a night or two. There's flexibility in size and location. When you're searching you can

look at guest favorites or even find like historical or really coolest things. It's my choice when we're traveling as a family. Some of my favorite memories are in Airbnb's we've stayed at I've recorded episodes of a podcast in Airbnb I've written books one of the very first Airbnb's I ever stayed in was in Santa Barbara, California While I was finishing up what was my first book trust me I'm lying if you haven't checked it out. I highly recommend you check out Airbnb for your next trip I recommend you check out Airbnb for your next trip.

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, audio books 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.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to a Sunday episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I talk about Australia too much. I confess. I talked about it a lot when I was heading over there this summer. I talked about it in the reading list email when I read a bunch of amazing books in a sunburned country, one of my all time favorites. Then I read Tree of Life. I just read this book called The Fatal Shore

about the founding of Australia. I got too into it. That's on me. Talk about the swimming pools there all the time. You know, I got a problem. I wish I was born in Australia. I wish I lived in Australia. I was talking to my brother-in-law

and he was looking at some sort of opportunities. Like, oh, but it's I was born in Australia. I wish I lived in Australia. I was talking to my brother-in-law and he was looking at some sort of opportunities like, oh, but it's all the way in Australia. And I was like, man, I would live there in like three seconds. How could you not take this excuse to live there? But anyways, different strokes. So as you know, I was there to give some talks and well now I can play one of them for you on Sundays where you do deep dives into different topics and sometimes I bring you the talks that if you didn't want to fly all the way across the world to attend in person, you can now listen to. This was at Sydney Town Hall.

It was a beautiful venue. I will say it got off to a somewhat inauspicious start. I get there and getting ready and then this crazy fire alarm goes off and they have to empty out the entire venue and no one's allowed back in until the actual fire department approved it. I didn't let it knock me off my block. I didn't let it screw up the talk. This was one of the first times I have ever talked in not just this kind of venue, but

in this kind of audience. Most of the talks that I do are to corporate audiences or to a sports team or to an offsite or to an industry association. Somebody brings me in to talk to their people. And I don't often get to go talk to my people, that is you guys. This is 2,000 people in Australia. And I got to do really a deep dive

into some stoic concepts that I wanna talk about as opposed to an introduction to stoicism, which is what I'm so often doing. So this was really fun for me. This is the first time I've given this talk, basically maybe the only time, because the one I gave in Melbourne was a little bit different.

Anyways, I'll give it to you. And maybe if you're listening in Australia and you want to have me come back, I could do it again because I miss those pools already and I miss your lovely country. So here is me talking Stoicism in Sydney. Enjoy. Thank you. It's very wonderful to be here. Guys, I don't know how to tell you this, but this is way too many people for a lecture about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. I know not everyone comes out all the way out to Australia, but you sure you don't have better things to do? No, I, of course, am very excited about Stoic philosophy. I know you're excited about stoic philosophy. Not everyone gets excited about a bunch of old dead white guys

in togas, I know. Not only is it unusual I think that you're excited, some people are confused as to why you are excited. When I got here a couple weeks ago, I got this book on Diogenes the Cynic. I went to Abby's bookstore there, not far from here, right near Hyde Park. And reading this book, I'm researching it for something I'm writing, and this is what it says. It says, considering Stoicism's unexpected resurgence in today's pop culture marketplace, it may

be worth pointing out that the teachings of Xeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, the school's original triumvirate, have precious little in common with the vulgar forms of stoic doctrine now being hawked from all corners of the internet and dispensed at weekend retreats for Wall Street and Silicon Valley warriors who come together to enjoy manly companionship fortified by selective readings from Epictetus and Mark Ceruleus. So I came all the way to your lovely country and I caught some stray bullets from this random book I bought. No, it's lovely to be here. It's particularly lovely to be here because I have a very vivid memory of

finishing the first draft of The Obstacle is the Way on a plane from Sydney to Perth. I'm going to do a lot of quotes just to piss that guy off. One of my favorite quotes from Seneca, he says that the whole world is a temple of the gods. He was talking about the beauty of the natural world. And I remember I got up early and I went for a run here, took the plane, landed, took a walk in Perth and I watched the sunset, right? Sunrise on one coast, sunset on the other and I remember just thinking the whole world

is a temple of the gods. And I've been thinking a lot about that since I have been here in your very lovely country. I love to swim, it's one of my hobbies, it's one of my favorite things to do. I swim pretty often where I live in Austin, Texas in this place called Barton Springs, which is one of the wonders of the earth in my opinion. It's this natural spring, something like 30 million gallons of water comes up from

deep under the earth every single day. It's exactly 71 degrees Fahrenheit. It doesn't matter if it's snowing outside, doesn't matter if it's 110 degrees out, which it probably is now, it's always 71 degrees. And I like to swim in there's fish and turtles and plants, it's endangered species, it's this incredible oasis that people have been coming to for literally thousands of years. And I was thinking of the beauty of Barton Springs

and then I was swimming in icebergs yesterday and watching the waves crash over into the pool and I remember thinking the whole world is a temple of the gods. I couldn't swim in icebergs today, the waves were too high, so I had to just settle for sitting on the third story and just watching these enormous waves crash over some of the biggest waves I've ever seen in my life. The whole world is a temple of the gods and I would say Australia is a temple of temples. You're all very lucky to live here and I'm excited to be here talking with all of you. And in fact the reason I was here when I sent in the manuscript for the obstacles away is I

was giving one of my first ever public talks which I'm sure was horrible for everyone involved. I know it was particularly bad for my wife who had to listen to me go over it, over it, and over and over again on that walk from Bondi to Bronte. And in fact to get her to come on this trip and bring the family I had to promise that I would not subject her to one single version of it. So if I screw up tonight it's her fault. I didn't get to practice. No, I was very nervous. I still get nervous before talks. Maybe that's not stoic. She likes to say that one of us is a stoic and the other writes about stoicism. But the thing is you don't become a writer because you want to talk to thousands of people.

That's the exact opposite reason that you become a writer. You become a writer because you want to go in your room and not talk to people. And then if you're lucky enough to succeed, you end up here. I can very vividly remember going to my publisher in 2012 and telling them I wanted to write a book about stoicism. Again, they were not excited. They did not predict this. I definitely did not predict this. If I had predicted like 1 10th of this,

I either would have been insane or I should have been blocked from writing ego is the enemy, because that would have been the definition of ego and delusions of grandeur. So they were nice enough to take a shot. They told me later, much later, that they were just humoring me. They hoped that I would get this stoicism thing

out of my system and go back to writing marketing books. But I sent in that manuscript and a few weeks later I heard back from my editor and she said, you know, wow, she said, wow, I think you actually have a home run here. And again, they were surprised. I was surprised. I haven't heard something like that from an editor before.

I almost certainly will not hear it again. But I've been thinking a lot as I've been here, because I'm working on a 10-year anniversary edition of the obstacle is the way. I don't feel like someone who could have a book that's 10 years old, but apparently I am. And as I've been working on this version, I'm getting to update it, getting to change things, getting to correct things.

It's a Ryan's version, if you will. And as I've been working on this new edition, I've been thinking about what it means when we say the obstacle is the way. Because on some superficial level, I think we all get it. Every cloud has its silver linings. There can be good in every situation if we look for it. I saw Hamlet at the Opera House a couple of weeks ago. Nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.

OK, I think at some level we understand that's what we mean when we say the obstacle is the way, right? Things happen. A fire alarm goes off right before you're supposed to give a talk and you have to adapt and adjust and find the good. Yeah, of course, we get that. Then I tell this story in the book about this Zen King. The king puts a large boulder and the only path into town and people come across it and they can't get where they want to go and some are upset, some are frustrated, some are disappointed. Most of them turn around and go home, some of

them just sit and wait for someone else to do something about it. One man decides to wrestle with this obstacle and he manages to get it out of the path and underneath he finds a pouch of gold coins, a little note attached and it says the obstacle is the path. Never forget that inside every problem obstacle adversity is a chance to improve your condition. It's an opportunity to improve your condition. Okay we understand at a superficial level that's what we mean when we say the obstacle is the way and I think that's what at a superficial level that's what we mean when we say the obstacle is the way. And I think that's what I was responding to, that's what I was talking

about as I wrote that book in my early 20s, particularly thinking about a business audience, thinking about entrepreneurs, thinking about people who run into problems and difficulties and they have to keep going, they have to find a way to move forward. But as I've thought more and more about what Marcus Aurelius meant, as he wrote in Meditations that, you know, our actions can be impeded, but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions, he says, because we can accommodate and adjust. The mind converts to its own purposes, the obstacle to our acting. He says the impediment to action advances action,

what stands in the way becomes the way. Was Marcus Rilius talking about, you know, responding to the small ups and downs of life? I don't think so. I think it was something deeper than that. You know, some people who maybe like that guy that didn't like me very much, they've said that Marcus Rilius is depressing, that meditations is me very much. They've said that Marcus Aurelius is depressing,

that meditations is a little dark. And I would agree, and that's because Marcus Aurelius' life was fucking depressing. Like, Marcus Aurelius' life was dark. This is a man who loses his father early on. He's thrust into politics, not something he sought or ever wanted. We're actually told he breaks down weeping

when he's told he will someday be king, because you can think of all the bad kings of history. Maybe it seems fun to be the emperor, but it doesn't tend to go well for people who become emperor. And it turns out to be like one thing after another for this guy. Actually an ancient historian who lives in Mark Surrealist's

time would say that Mark Surrealist doesn't meet with the good fortune that he deserves. His whole reign is involved in a series of troubles. To which Mark Surrealist would have said, a series of troubles man, what the hell are you talking about, this has been tragedy after tragedy, heartbreak after heartbreak. 20 years of peace and prosperity and stability just evaporate like the day he takes over. There's a historic flood, a devastating flood,

devastating pandemic, a plague that lasts not for like one or two or three years but like 15 years. Millions of Romans die. He spends years of his reign fighting these endless wars. He would say, life is warfare and a journey far from home. He was speaking literally. He just spends so much of his time away and not by choice. They say that no parent should have to bury a child. Marcus Aurelius has to attend six funerals for his children. Half of his children.

Half of his children do not make it to adulthood. Life is a devastating series of hammer blows of pain and misfortune and awfulness for this guy. One thing after another. And so honestly, I would say that this work, meditations here, is actually a work of profound optimism and hope and perseverance. That he kept going, that this guy got out of bed

every morning was a statement of optimism and hope. His life was dark, but he keeps going, he perseveres through all of it. Actually, that same historian would say that he admires Marcus all the more for this very reason because amidst these extraordinary circumstances, he survives and preserves the empire. I know you guys have wildfires here.

We have them obviously where I live. There's a species of pine tree in the American West, and it's pine cone. It looks like an ordinary pine cone, but it's covered in this thick resin, and it can't shed the resin. the to create the next generation of growth, right, for the most essential thing that it needs to do to happen, to reproduce, it has to be exposed to the heat of a forest fire. So this thing that seems devastating and destructive that you'd think it would want to avoid,

in fact, it needs, it craves, because it unlocks the pine cone that allows the tree, the species, to continue. And you could argue that this is something akin to who Marcus Aurelius is. These wouldn't have been things he wanted. These aren't things he deserved. These were destructive, dangerous, terrible things.

And yet they unlock some form of greatness in him that I don't think would have been seen in ordinary circumstances. He himself would say that, you know, what you throw on top of a fire becomes fuel for the fire. He says it turns it all into flame and brightness and heat. I think that's a very beautiful way to put it, but it would have been terrible as he went through it. It would have been devastating as he went through it.

And I think that's what he means when he's saying, the obstacle is the way. It's something deeper. It's more profound. I think about the 10 years that have passed since I wrote the book. Nothing akin to what Marcus Aurelius went through. You know, there's a Chinese curse, though.

May you live in interesting times. I would say the last 10 years have been interesting, right? They've been, I think I can, I do have the obstacles the way tattooed on my arm, so I can't say it was hard, but I think I can say it was a lot. The last 10 years have been a lot. It was stuff like this fire alarm going off right before I go on stage. A lot, right? Just a lot of that.

I traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, I wrote many books. I started businesses. Some of them succeeded. Some of them did not succeed. I had relationships fall apart. I lost people that I loved. I dealt with stuff as we all did, right? The last three years have been tough. The last four years have been tough. It's been a lot.

It's been a lot. I remember thinking my wife and I had this somewhat crazy idea to open a bookstore in the small town that we live in. It was probably crazy under ordinary circumstances and then we started construction the first week of March 2020. And it started to seem like, oh, we've made a huge mistake. This is a huge mistake. There was fires and floods and freezes and then this whole crippling global pandemic that happened.

And we looked out, I remember looking out one day at this very empty bookstore. It wasn't empty, like we dumped our life savings in it and it had books and we'd done all the construction, all of which had taken longer than expected and cost more than expected. And then there was no people. There was no people.

And I remember thinking, I don't control what the virus does. I don't control what the government does. I don't control what other people do. I don't control the economy. I don't control what other people do, I don't control the economy, I don't control any of this. But I wrote this note to myself and I said, this is a test, will it make you a better person or a worse person? I don't control whether I can turn this into a great successful business. That's out of my hands.

That's largely due to these macro factors. But on the micro, what I control is who I am inside it. Does it make me better or worse? Do I grow from this? Am I changed by it? Do I learn from it? Do I keep my integrity and my values intact throughout it? I think that's what Marcus Aurelius was saying when he said the obstacle is away, that these

obstacles are a chance for us to challenge ourselves as human beings, to live out our values, to act with virtue and excellence and be the people that we were meant to be. I don't think Marcus Aurelius, we would be talking about him today if things had gone the way that he wanted them to go. And that, to me, is what Stoicism is, the ability to be made better by how things go, as opposed to them going the way that you want them to go. And I want you to think about the last 10 years for you.

I know if you had told me 10 years ago or 12 years ago as I was finishing the obstacles away, what lay ahead, good and bad, I would have said, I don't know if I'm up for that. That seems exhausting. That seems inconceivable to me. I don't know if I could withstand that kind of pressure and that workload

and those temptations and that workload and those temptations and those challenges and those obstacles. I think if you had told most of us at the outset of 2020 what the pandemic was actually going to entail, how long it was gonna go, what it meant, what the death toll would be, what the challenges and stresses would be, I think most of us would have said,

I don't know if I can handle that. That sounds like something that a much stronger person could handle, but not me. But we come from those people, by definition. There's a quote from James Baldwin I love. He's writing to his nephew, and he says, remember you come from sturdy peasant stock. He said people who built railroads and dammed rivers and crossed oceans.

He said people who achieved a dignity, a monumental dignity in the teeth of incredible adversity. And we all come from that kind of stock. By definition, think of the people that settled this country, think of the people who were here before those people settled this country. We all come by definition from an unbroken chain of survivors, people who went through incredible amounts of adversity and difficulty and survived and endured. And we ourselves now join the ranks of those people.

In the past, we might ask our grandparent what it was like to be in World War II or live through the Depression or some challenging historical moment, but the last several years have been those historical moments and we're all here. You are tough motherfuckers or you wouldn't be here. You made it, right?

You made it on the other side. And what the Stoics say is, what comes out of the other side of that has to be an awareness, a sense, kind of confidence that comes from that, that you won. Seneca says he pities people who haven't been through adversity,

who got things the way they wanted them to go, because they don't know what they're capable of. And that's what we draw from this, a sense of what we're capable of. That is how the obstacle is the way. It teaches us what we have inside us, things that couldn't be accessed in ordinary conditions. So the Obstacles the Way came out in 2014. It sold a few thousand copies its first week, and then it sold less copies the next week,

and fewer copies the week after that, and fewer copies after the week after that, and it kind of trickled down to a very small number. But I didn't, I wasn't thinking that much about how it did, because I was working on my next book, and it was, it was kicking my ass, to be perfectly honest. And then some weird things started to happen over the next year year and a half I got some lucky breaks things that I had no idea about that I

didn't plan Amazon discounted the book it stayed discounted as an e-book and people slowly started to buy it some people in sports started to talk about it the New England Patriots talked about it on their way to winning the Super Bowl. And so the book started to sell. It started to sell steadily and then it started to sell a lot. But again, I wasn't thinking so much about the success because I was working on my next book

and it was still kicking my ass. And I tell this story for a couple reasons. One, I just found this to be a helpful strategy in life. If you're focused on how something you already did is doing, how it's being received, what people are saying about it, how it's selling, you're focused on something that's not in your control. But if you're focused on doing the thing,

doing the verb, writing the next project, working on the next launch, whatever that thing is for you, when you're focused on doing that thing, training, practicing, learning, growing, putting in the work, you're focused on what is in your control. And as it happens, that book that I was working on is Ego is the Enemy. Now in retrospect, it seems like I kind of knew this all along, that I predicted it, that I transitioned from marketing

to write about stoicism. The first book started selling, and the second book started selling, and then off to the races. But it wasn't like that at all. I didn't know. My publisher didn't know. It was a series of random accidents and quite a bit of luck.

But what ego does is it tells yourself a story about what happened, and it gives you more credit for it than you deserved, right? It puffs you up. It misleads you. The stories we tell ourselves about our success or other people's success, they obscure. They inflate, right?

They deliver credit. And so I've tried to be very conscious about remembering how it actually happened and how it actually went. And here's how you know I didn't predict any of it. I was working on Ego is the Enemy and I hadn't even quit my day job yet. I was the director of marketing

at this company called American Apparel, which was at that point one of the fastest, biggest fashion companies in the world. Had 12,000 employees at stores in 20 countries, including some lovely stores here in Australia. They made tens of millions of garments a year. They had sales of nearly a billion dollars. And I was working on that book as that company imploded, tore itself to pieces. And as it happens, Dove, the founder of American Apparel, that's not how things go. And by definition, you prove them wrong on the way to your success, right?

If you're not a successful entrepreneur, you're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful entrepreneur.

You're not a successful entrepreneur. You're not a successful, that that's not how things go. And by definition, you prove them wrong on the way to your success, right? If everyone listened to the critics and the realists, we would never experience change. Nothing new would ever happen. And so to succeed is, by definition, to defy the odds and to defy the doubters.

But what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives and successful people is that they learn a very dangerous lesson from this, which is that you don't listen to critics, which is that doubters are haters, right? Which is that people that try to guide you in a certain direction or help you or advise you are just holding you back.

Sometimes they're trying to prevent you from plunging off a cliff. This happened at American Apparel. You can imagine, I'll give you another example. Elon Musk, when Elon Musk set out to take his internet fortune and put it into a space company, when he wanted to found SpaceX, his friends held a literal

Alcoholics Anonymous style intervention. They said, you cannot do this. This is a terrible idea. You will lose all your money. Obviously, he didn't listen and created a multi-billion dollar company out of that. So when he decided to spend $40 billion to buy Twitter, which everyone said is a really bad idea and won't work and will blow up in your face and everyone's faces, right, why would he listen?

He's been hearing that his whole life. And so what ego does is it makes it really hard to discern good advice from bad advice, truth from fiction, right? It gets between you and what you're trying to do. Actually, that's how they define ego in AA. They say it's a conscious separation from. Ego is a conscious separation from reality, from other people,

from objective truth, from how things happened, right? It's something that inflates, that puffs up, that misleads. It's that voice that whispers in your head that they don't know what they're talking about. You're a genius. You were right last time, right? It's gonna be like this always, it's different this time. That voice that gets in your head and this is why as Cyril Connolly said, ego sucks us down like the law of gravity because sometimes they are right and we are wrong and ego makes it really hard to

discern the difference and I saw that at And ego makes it really hard to discern the difference. And I saw that at American Apparel when they tried to tell Dove, hey, you got to hire competent operators to help you run this now enormous company. Well, he saw all those competent operators as a threat. That's probably why a 21-year-old was running marketing at that company.

In retrospect, that was also insane. When they said, hey, you can't have relationships with your employees, that's illegal, he said, who are you to tell me what to do? And then got himself in a lot of trouble, right? When ego tells us that the rules don't apply, that we're better, that we always know what we're doing, all these people are holding us back.

And I watched that happen, and it was a very terrifying and eye-opening thing. Actually, part of the reason I didn't quit the job is that Stokes said we shouldn't be pen and ink philosophers, just people who write and think all the time. We have to be out in the world, meeting people, doing things, experiencing things, so we can match the theory and the ideas

with the nitty-gritty of actual life. And so it was a very lucky opportunity. I mean, it was terrible to watch and sad and heartbreaking, but also very revealing and it informed that book a great deal. I remember as I was working on it, I went and I visited an NFL coach who'd read Obstacle and he said, what are you working on? And I said, you know, I'm thinking about doing a book about humility. It was still sort of in development. And he said, oh, that's interesting.

He said, you know, ego is the cancer of my profession. And that really hit me. Ego is the cancer of my profession. I think it's the cancer of your profession. It's the cancer of all professions. It's a plague on this earth. I would say that the biggest obstacle that you face is not out there, it's not the economy,

it's not regulations, it's not competitors. What's most likely gonna sink or destroy you is within you, it is you and it's that ego. And so how do we keep it at bay? What do we do about it? You just realized your business needed to hire someone like yesterday. With Indeed, there's no need to stress. You can find amazing candidates fast using sponsored jobs.

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Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Two questions that I've gotten the most since writing Ego is the Enemy. The first is people go, of course ego is really bad. I know this, my boss has a huge ego. What can I do about it? Never do they, my boss has a huge ego, what can I do about it? Never do they say, I have a huge ego,

I need help with it, right? That's the definition of ego, by the way, we can see it in other people, but we think we don't have one, because we're special and better. Of course we all have an ego, but it's just easier to see the flaws in other people and to point them out and focus on them

than to look in the mirror and handle our own stuff. The second thing I get is people go, obviously ego's bad, but don't you need a little bit of it? You need a little bit of ego, right? And this is maybe something I didn't do well enough in the book in retrospect. And if I was doing another version, I would talk more about it.

There is, of course, a huge distinction between ego and confidence. I would actually argue on a spectrum you have ego over here that sort of know it when you see it ego that we all don't like and we see how it holds other people back and then on the other end of the spectrum I'd actually say that like imposter syndrome or crippling self-doubt, people who believe the world is rigged against them, that it's impossible for them to succeed. That's another version of ego, because again, you're thinking too much about yourself.

And it's somewhere in the middle is confidence. That confidence is the Aristotelian, the golden mean between these two extremes. And I actually think one of the oldest fables we have or the oldest stories we have, is an illustration of this idea. The story of David and Goliath is not a story of big versus small.

It's a story of confidence versus ego. Goliath issues his famous challenge in the war against the Israelites. He's big, he's strong. Let's settle this man-to-man combat. Whoever can beat me is the victor. And this challenge is ignored for 90 consecutive days. I'm not going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him.

I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going to be able to fight him.

I'm going to be able to fight him. I'm going." And they laugh at him. Again, he's brave enough to think he can do it and they're convinced why he can't do it. And he says, no, no, look, I know I'm just a shepherd, I'm not a soldier, but it's not easy being a shepherd, you know, I have to be out there by myself, I have to take care of these animals, I have to fight off bears and wolves that fight the elements. It's not easy. I think I can do it. And so as a joke, they fit him out in a soldier's kit.

And he puts it on, and he realizes immediately that this isn't going to work. He's too small. He can't even bear the weight of the armor. And so he takes it off, and he has to get creative. He realizes he has his sling, he goes down to the stream, he fetches out a few stones, and then he steps up to challenge Goliath.

And Goliath laughs at him, which is the last thing that Goliath ever does. Because soon enough he's felled by one of these stones which rockets off the slingshot at an incredible speed. And then this is the part of the story they don't tell kids. David cuts off Goliath's head with Goliath's sword. And in the famous Carvaggio painting where David is holding Goliath's head up like this, the head almost being bigger than his whole body, the sword that he's holding has the Latin acronym HOCS on it, which just stands for Humility Kills Pride. What David has is

confidence but also some self-awareness. He thinks he can do it. He knows he can't do it certain ways. He certainly knows he's not as strong as Goliath. What Goliath has is ego, a sense that he is invincible and unbeatable and thus totally unaware of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The reason ego is so dangerous is not only that, but it is easily outmatched by someone who has some humility and self-awareness. What David is able to do is pit his strength against Goliath's weakness. And you have to have this self-awareness to be able to do that.

If you think you're perfect, if you think you're invincible, if you think you can do anything, right, you become stuck. One of my favorite quotes from Epictetus, he says, remember it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Right? it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. Right, we can see how in a less violent domain, what ego does, what ego thinks that you're God's gift, when ego thinks that you're perfect, when ego thinks you know everything, in a sense, you're right because you can't improve, you can't get better, you can't grow. Socrates, on the other hand, has this humility, right? He knows what he doesn't know,

he's willing to ask questions, and in this he is always getting better and growing. And so ego impedes us, it prevents us from changing and learning and adapting, and the confidence to know what we don't know, what we need to do better, where we have weaknesses. This is what we're trying to cultivate here. And ego is this thing that it creeps in, it finds a way. And so it's not this thing that you get rid of once, but a thing that you have to constantly be on guard against. My favorite chapter in that book though is a chapter

I talk about fundamental exercise of Stoke philosophy is is this in my control is this not in my control and and ultimately what's in our control is the work that we put in not what we take out not the results. And I wrote this chapter about how the effort has to be enough you have to be satisfied with what you're doing and you can't expect or feel entitled to the fruits of that labor necessarily. It's one thing to talk about this, but by the time that book had come out, the sort of trend of stoicism had changed quite a bit.

And the book was anticipated. The book sold well. I found out the week it came out that I'd sold enough copies I was set to debut at number one on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and as I got this news from my agent and then sat there and waited the next few hours for the email to come out with the PDF of the list expecting this awesome thing that I'd earned, that I'd fought for, that I'd been fortunate enough to be blessed with and it came in and not only was I not number one, I wasn't on the list at all.

Not at all. And I don't know why to this day, I don't know why we think maybe someone entered something wrong or maybe I just got snubbed, but it was a painful lesson in this idea that we control what we put in and not what we put out. And if you have expectations, if you have in this idea that we control what we put in and not what we put out. And if you have expectations, if you have an entitlement, this is where you set yourself up to have your heart broken, to be disappointed, to be crushed because nobody actually cares

what you earned, what you deserve. Life is not fair. These things are not meritocratic, it's more complicated than that. And so as I dealt with that disappointment having to deal with the reality of you know not getting this thing that I thought I was gonna get, I realized I needed to apply some of these ideas a little bit better in my in my own life. I wouldn't say that I had a nervous breakdown

after ego is the enemy, but it was a bit of a personal reckoning. I mean, you can't watch someone you admire, someone who had discovered you, someone who said, I see a lot of myself in you, blow themselves up and drive their company into double bankruptcy and not go, what, what did they see in me again? And again, it's easy to see ego in other people.

It's easy to see how other people are out of balance, out of alignment, how they're getting themselves into trouble. It's harder to look in the mirror and see that in yourself. I remember there's a quote in Ego's Enemy from the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He says, the first sign of an impending nervous collapse is the belief that your work is terribly, terribly important.

And I remember having a panic attack shortly after writing that because I couldn't get to my email and there was something I thought was really important to send. And I thought, oh, this is not good. I might be going down this very road. And so my life was just crazy and complicated and too out of balance. And not what stoicism is supposed to be. What I've always admired most about the stoics was their even keelness. Imagine how stressful it would have been to be Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Rome. Imagine how stressful it would be to be Seneca or Epictetus. What the Stoics tried to cultivate

was this idea of ataraxia, a freedom from disturbances, even in the midst of crazy, busy, chaotic lives. They tried to cultivate, as Marcus Aurelius said, to be like the rock that the waves crash over and eventually the sea falls still around. And I just, that wasn't the path that I was on, that wasn't how my life was set up. I'd moved to Austin, Texas, sometime in the middle of all this, and coming out of Ego Xanime, my wife and I decided to really

move to Texas. Well, actually what happened is we bought a goat on Craigslist, as one does. And then we found out that they get very lonely, and so you have to have two goats. And then we got chickens, and then we had our eye on a donkey. And we ended up buying a ranch about 30 or 40 minutes outside of Austin and we moved out to the country, which is exactly what I needed at this moment because it was

just far enough away. First off, it's in the middle of the country and not going to New York or Los Angeles as much. I'm just a little bit disconnected and I had to sort of reimagine what I wanted my life to be like, especially day to day. Seneca talked about the busy idleness of most Romans. He said, you know, you catch them leaving their house or running from this to that,

and you ask them where they're going and why they're doing it, and they couldn't give much of an answer. He said, it's this busy idleness. He said, a life without design is erratic, and I think that's what we can often easily slip into, kind of an erratic fire to fire, problem to problem, activity to activity,

job to job, without a sense of who we are, what we should be doing, and certainly not enough of this ataraxia or stillness. So I decided I was going to redesign my life a little bit, and I started with what time I woke up in the morning and I know hey wake up early is like the most basic life advice you can hear but I had really fallen in love

as I think a lot of us do with kind of the image of a writer getting to make their own hours following the inspiration or on the other end the entrepreneur burns the midnight oil, the sort of hustle culture, pulling all-nighters. I kind of had gotten caught up in this idea that that's what work looked like, that that's what success was. And it's just not the way I wanted to live my life anymore. So I started, I just started by waking up early.

And like a lot of people, my life was too centered around my phone. I think we can all agree that our phone takes up too much time in our life. And so I started this rule. I don't touch my phone for the first 30 minutes or one hour that I'm awake. I don't wanna get sucked into the phone. I don't wanna be immediately reactive, which is what most people do. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine, said, look, I get up early.

He's like, I check my phone, obviously, just to see if there's any fires I have to put out, and then I go do what I'm supposed people do. I remember I was talking to a friend of mine, said look I get up early, he's like I check my phone obviously just to see if there's any fires I have to put out and then I go do what I'm supposed to do. I said but I'm sure you always find them right? We go looking for the fires, the problems, our our email inbox is like a to-do list that other people have put together for us. What has happened on social media while we're sleeping, what texts that have come in, right? We wake up, I just, there was too many days that were ruined before my feet even touched the ground. So I decided to create a little bit of a bubble

and with that bubble, I get outside, I take my kids for a walk. We get outside, we get moving. Stillness is not the absence of movement. In fact, movement is often one of the best ways to cultivate stillness. And then when I come back from that walk, I take them to school, what I try to do in my day is do the hard thing first.

And by hard thing, I mean what is the thing that requires the most uninterrupted focus and attention? I believe we have a finite amount of this, and the problem is we fritter it away early on by not being disciplined or intentional. And then when we need it to write something or think something or plan something, we don't have it. And so this is kind of how I build my day. The next thing I try to do after I have to do all the things

that are scheduled and all the obligations that we all have is I try to make some time for my hobbies too. I my hobbies are mostly exercise related. I like to run or bike or swim every single day. And I think hobbies that are active are wonderful. Churchill coming out of the tragedy, the Gallipoli campaign, he has his own nervous breakdown and his sister-in-law gives him a paint set. She says, I think you should try this. I think it might give you some, do you some good. It's actually a children's paint set. And he never quite graduates above being a child level painter.

He is not a good painter, but painting as a hobby for him is what allows him to be great, what allows him to do what he does. He writes this beautiful book called Painting as a Pastime. He says every important person must have one or two hobbies, and he said they should be real. Right? They should get you outside. They should be active.

They should challenge you. It's actually wonderful to have something that you're not good at. It keeps the ego at bay. It's wonderful to be a student of something. Right? What gets you out of your comfort zone? What gets you out of your comfort zone? It's wonderful to have something that you're not good at. It keeps the ego at bay. It's wonderful to be a student of something. What gets you out of your comfort zone?

So for me, exercise is so different than sitting in a chair and writing. It gets me out and moving. And then after I do that, I try to be done in time to pick up my kids for school and be home for dinner, and I try to get to bed early. I think it's perfectly possible to be successful and productive and great at what you do

and keep regular, consistent, reasonable hours. The problem is we're so inefficient, we're so reactive, we're jerked around by so many things that we don't do this enough. Actually, I think to me the key of having a great schedule, a productive, a still life, is in a single word and that word is no. You have to be able to say no. I have a sign on my desk given to me by a great sports psychologist and it just says the word no and I have it framed between two pictures of my kids. And it's a reminder that when I say yes to people

because I don't want to be rude, I actually am being rude to someone else. That everything we say yes to is saying no to something else, to someone else often. And that when we say yes, and when we say no, we are also saying yes to things that really matter. Mark Struthers said this was the essential question you have to ask yourself.

He says, in everything you do and say that. Mark said this was the essential question. You have to ask yourself. He says, everything you do and say and think, is this essential? Because so much of what we do and say and think is not essential. He says when we eliminate the inessential, we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. I interviewed Matthew McConaughey for the Daily Stoke podcast not too long ago. He said in Hollywood he has a reputation for being a quick no and a long yes. I thought that's a great way to think about it.

Instinctively, naturally, reactively no to almost all things, right? And then when we're going to say yes, we have to really think about it, we have to really be intentional about it. We can't be afraid to hurt people's feelings, we can't be afraid to miss out on some things. Seneca defined tranquility or stillness in a word, he called it euthymia. He said that this this euthymia, this tranquility was a sense of the path that you're on without being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. Right? That's the confidence. The sense of the path that you're on and not being

distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. And he says it's especially important that we're not distracted by the paths of those who are hopelessly lost. This is why we have to say no, why we have to be intentional, why we have to be deliberate, why we have to have this confidence. And one of the things I think we have to say no to is the noise of the world. I was rereading Bill Bryson's wonderful book about Australia on the way here and he talked about the simple

pleasure of reading the newspaper in a country you are not from. Right? At home the news is frustrating and annoying and scary and non-stop. I gotta say it's been very wonderful being in Australia as America melts down. To see it with the benefit of a time delay, right, to see it through another country's eyes. What this is giving you is perspective and distance. When you're scrolling the feed, when you're watching it live on television, right, you're too close to it.

You need to be able to step back to see it from another perspective. It's been fascinating to watch the Olympics in a country you're not from, right? You go, you guys are cheering for the wrong perspective. It's been fascinating to watch the Olympics in a country you're not from. You go, you guys are cheering for the wrong people. What's happening? But it's interesting. You get a distance from it in a different way.

Just like walking down the streets, you're seeing statues, people who are famous, that I've never even heard of. They're famous enough to have a statue. I've never heard of them. It gives you perspective on your own accomplishments. I did like learning about Flinders the cat. That was very interesting. We have a very famous cat here. But no, seeing things from a distance from another people's eyes, right, this exercise that we get when

we travel or when we step back or we take a break from things, this is key because then when we go back into the world, we can have a little bit more stillness. I'm not saying you never watch the news, you never check social media, but it's how you do it, it's what you bring to it, and we're gonna have to cultivate this because the world is only getting crazier. You know, America is good at exporting ideas. I'm sure we will find a way to export our craziness all over the world, and you guys will have

what we are having now at some point in the future. And so if you can't cultivate a stillness inside this, it's gonna drive you crazy. And so trying to develop this, to have a little bit more of this in my life, in the summer of 2019, I took my family out for a walk in Bastrop, which is the town where my little bookstore is.

We're out in this thing called the Lost Pines Forest, which is this prehistoric forest that's been there for thousands of years, tragically burned down about 10 years ago, and it's just starting to come back. And we're out just on a Saturday morning having a wonderful time. I'm not thinking about work,

I'm not thinking about my next project, I'm not thinking about anything but this experience. I have my youngest in a backpack, my oldest is trucking alongside, and this idea pops into my head. I think creative people have all had this experience. It's when you're doing something else, it's when you're not thinking about the work thing

that the solution magically comes to you. This is why hobbies are so important. This is why space and stillness is so important, right? Your mind is a wonderful, powerful thing. You gotta give it room to do what it did. And what popped into my head was this idea space and stillness is so important, right? Your mind is a wonderful, powerful thing. You gotta give it room to do what it did. And what popped into my head was this idea of doing a series on the cardinal virtues,

the virtues of stoicism. The virtues of stoicism, for those of you who don't know, are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. People think that this has a religious connotation, right? Because virtue seems religious and then cardinal, like a cardinal, right? Now cardinal comes from the Latin cardos, or hinge, or pivot.

These are pivotal values and in fact the four virtues, although Stoicism and Christianity share them, they come from Zeno in the fourth century BC. He suffers a shipwreck, loses everything, but he responds with courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. He would joke later that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck

because it changed the course of his life. It drove him thus to philosophy. And Marcus Rilius would say that the obstacle is the way because the obstacle is an opportunity to practice one of these four virtues. It's always an opportunity to practice courage and justice and discipline and wisdom. One of my favorite passages he says, how does this stop you? This situation, this person, this thing you're dealing with, this unfairness, this evil in the world head, and it's an accidental series,

because obstacle and ego and stillness had just kind of come together. And in this case, I was going to be intentional. I was going to sit down and do this thing. And that's what I've been working on now for the last five years. It's been a challenge. It's been a challenge for me to be able to do this. And I'm going to be able to do this. And I'm going to be able to do this. And I was going to be intentional. I was going to sit down and do this thing.

And that's what I've been working on now for the last five years. It's been a challenge. I mean, courage, every society holds up courage as a value, right? We give out the Victoria Cross or the Medal of Honor. That's physical courage, right? Running into a burning building, a scene of a crime, exploring a dangerous

territory. And then of course there's moral courage. Moral courage is the courage of a scientist who explores the unknown, the activist who speaks truth to power, the entrepreneur who bets it all on a single idea. But I would say, or as I've come to see, that these are the same. Moral and physical courage are the same. It's about putting your ass on the line for someone or something. And we all know that's important.

We all know our life has changed by these things we've done, but what holds us back? The answer is fear holds us back. That's why stoicism is such an important philosophy, that the rational side of stoicism to question those emotions, to not let fear rule, to really think about what this means and what it represents, this is how we combat that fear.

It's also how we develop confidence by testing things in the real world. I remember when I went to drop out of college, I felt like I held my life in my hands. It was the scariest thing that I've ever done. I was worried I'd end up under a bridge somewhere if it didn't work out. That's what my parents thought. They basically disowned me over it. And as I went into the registrar's office and I told them I'm here to drop out of college,

they were like, what are you talking about? They're like, that's not even a thing. They're just fill out this form, it costs $40, and you can come back whenever you want. You just take a semester off, right? The reason we challenge these assumptions, the reason we push ourselves to do things that are scary is we learn something, we learn about how things actually work,

and we learn our ability to handle them, come out the other side. So when I went to eventually leave corporate life to be a writer I I knew what that leap felt like and I knew it wasn't as big of a leap as it seemed right we developed the confidence by doing things. I tell the story of Florence Nightingale in the book she's a hero of mine. Florence Nightingale here's this call like the call to adventure in the hero's journey call to adventure she's a hero of mine. Florence I can go, here's this call, like the call to adventure and the hero's journey. Call to adventure, she's called to nursing to help people.

But she doesn't listen and again, this is that fear. Mark Shrevely says, we all love ourselves more than other people, but we care about other people's opinions more than our own. She's held back by what her parents think, by what her friends think, by what society thinks. And finally she hears that voice again, says are you gonna let what her parents think, by what her friends think, by what society thinks. And finally, she hears that voice again. She says, are you going to let what other people think hold you back from service? And the answer for a lot of us, unfortunately, is

yes. We let these things that don't matter hold us back from what we're doing. So we need this moral courage more than ever. And I would define moral courage also, right, this myth of the invulnerable, emotionless robotic still. I hate it. My favorite quote from Mark Scurrilis, he says, we're like soldiers storming a wall. If you have to reach up and ask someone for help, so what? Right? The courage to admit that you're struggling, that you're scared, that you don't know what to do, that you don't know the answer, right? The courage to do this is a huge part of being able to move forward to realize, oh yeah,

people are happy to help, oh yeah, it's not as scary as you thought, oh yeah, there's all these resources that you could take advantage of. And then that leads us to the next virtue, which would be the virtue of discipline. Again, we have this physical and moral dichotomy. Obviously the physical discipline of Stoicism is interesting to me, I love it. Treat the body rigorously, Seneca says, so it's not disobedient to the mind. Push yourself, challenge yourself,

get in a cold plunge, get in the ocean when it's freezing. Develop that muscle, right? Marks really is the passage that hit me the most as a kid is the opening of book five of meditations. At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself I have to go to work as a human being, or is this what I was created for, to huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

But it's nicer here, he says. So you were born to feel nice? He says, people who love what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their art. They wear themselves down doing it. They forget even to wash and eat. So again, the physical discipline, that's part of it.

Being tough, pushing yourself, challenging yourself. But you know what he says next? He says, to shrug it all off and wipe it clean, every annoyance and distraction, and reach utter stillness. This is that emotional, mental discipline that we need, to be able to turn off the noise, to turn away from the noise, to not be rattled, to not be distracted, to be able to lock in

on what's in front of us. I tell the story of Queen Elizabeth in the book. And obviously, I think she was physically tougher than people thought. I mean, everywhere I've been in Australia, she visited at one point or another. She traveled millions of miles. She shook millions of hands.

She gave out hundreds of thousands of awards. She only fell asleep in public one time in 70 years. And it was when she was 80. And it was a lecture about magnets, so we can forgive her that. But I'm more impressed with the fact that she never once gave an on-the-record interview with a reporter.

She never complained, she never explained, right? She never asked people to pity her. She just embodied that she had a emotional and spiritual discipline that allowed her to endure being misunderstood, being criticized, being attacked, right? Which we have to cultivate in this world. And again, if you think that's easy, I'll bring up Elon Musk again. This is a guy who has 11 children. He's running multiple companies. He has incredible wealth. The future of humanity may depend on his success and getting us to another planet.

And what does he do? He wakes up every day and he chooses violence, he chooses to pick culture war battles, he tweets hundreds of times a day, he tweets before he thinks about things, he says some of the dumbest shit you could possibly imagine. It causes him incredible amounts of trouble, it's torpedoed his reputation.

It's gotten him in trouble with the law. He's always being deposed and lost. His lack of discipline in this regard is making him less successful and taking away from the very important work that we have. And I would argue that the ability to have no opinions about things, to not need to insert yourself into everything that's happening, to settle every argument, to allow people to be wrong on the internet, as they say, is a feat of strength in our time, which we must cultivate. Because we have the things that we're supposed to be doing, that we have control over, that we have influence over. If we don't have the discipline to lock into those things, we are lost. To not let the craziness of our times make

us crazy is why we need this discipline. And then the the book that I just did, that's the next virtue, it's the virtue of justice. And I think it says something, I would say it's an indictment of our time that when people think the word justice, think of the justice system, they think of judges and juries, they think about whether something is legal or not, which is so different than whether it's right or wrong, whether you should do it or not.

And this idea that the Stoics were indifferent to those things, I mean, Mark Swizz talks about working for and serving the common good something like 80 times in meditations. He would actually say that his definition of justice is good character and acts for the common good. So if your attraction to stoicism is that it simply makes you more productive or tougher or less emotional, you're missing a huge component here. Stoicism is not about making you a better sociopath. It's about making you more effective

at being a good human being who is effective and contributes positively to this world. And in fact, of the virtues that, you know, on a compass they call them the cardinal points, right? Again, cardos, not cardinal. Justice has to be the North Star, the North Star is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star.

It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North Star. It is the North thing. And the Stoics were involved in politics, the causes and issues of their time. They tried to be, as Mark Sarraza said, they fought to be the

person that philosophy tried to make them, which was good, which was decent, which was kind, which was of service. And so Stoicism has to be seen as this framework, this toolkit, not again for being strong or still, but also decent and good and just. And the last virtue, I wish I could give you a quick and clear definition of wisdom. I can't because I'm in the middle of writing about it. I am trying to figure it out.

It's a work in progress, but I have actually started to think that maybe that's a good way to think about wisdom. Because wisdom isn't this thing that you arrive at that you define. Wisdom is something that is elusive. There's something ineffable about it. It's like the horizon. As you move closer to it, it gets a little bit further away.

You never fully arrive. And if you think you have wisdom, then you definitely don't have it. And yet, we also kind of know what it is. When we think, when we speak of Gandhi's wisdom we're not thinking of his sharp legal mind. Obviously he's very smart and intelligent but wisdom is something deeper about understanding, about purpose, about humanity, about human nature. There's something there. And as I read meditations, I'm struck by Marcus Aurelius' primary influence.

His primary influence is not his philosophy teachers, it's not his parents, it's his adopted stepfather, Antoninus. So Hadrian sees something in this young boy, he thinks he could be a good ruler, but he knows that you can't put a teenager in charge of an empire. So what Hadrian does is he adopts Antoninus,

who in turn has to adopt Marcus Aurelius. And he probably expected Antoninus to live for a few years, teach Marcus, die, and let Marcus take over. Instead, Antoninus lives and rules for 20 plus years. So Marcus Aureliius has this long apprenticeship under a great man. And it's there that Marcus Relius learns wisdom. And we can see in his definition of it,

he says what he learned from Antoninus was compassion, justice, right? Unwavering adherence to decisions, indifference to superficial honors, hard work and persistence. Listening to anyone who could contribute to the public good, a sense of when to push and when to back off, his searching questions at meetings,

a kind of single-mindedness almost, never content with first impressions or breaking off the discussion prematurely, his advanced planning well in advance, and his discrete attention to minor things. His attitude towards the gods, no superstitiousness. And his attitude towards men, no demagoguery, no Korean favor, no pandering, always sober, always steady, never vulgar or prey to fads.

No one ever called him glib or shameless or pedantic. They saw him for what he was, a man tested by life, accomplished, unswayed by flattery, qualified to govern both himself and them. His respect for people who practice philosophy but without denigrating the others or listening to them. This in particular, his willingness to yield the Florida experts in oratory, law, psychology, or whatever, and support them energetically so each could fulfill their potential. And then he says, you could say of him, as they say of Socrates, that he knew how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy.

Strength, perseverance, self-control in both areas, the mark of a soul and readiness, indomitable. To me, that's about as good a definition as you can get of wisdom. And Marcus learns it the way we learn most things, by apprenticing under someone great, by studying the greats, by looking at them from a distance

and learning what he could from them. As we wrap up here, you've noticed I've sort of gone through all the books, a little eras tour, if you will. But I skipped one, maybe I skipped the one that brought you here. I skipped the Daily Stoic. And I skipped the Daily Stoic because it's important that we see stoicism not as a thing that you have read

or that you know about or have studied, but as a thing you are reading, that you are doing, that you are studying. It is an ongoing process. And that's what it is for me. I wrote the Daily Stoic in 2015. Supposed to be one page of stoic philosophy every day, like an entry point into the philosophy for people who didn't know if they should start with Marcus Aurelius or Seneca or Epictetus.

And then I kept going. I just said, oh, I'll just send out an email version of it every day. And I've kept going. And I've done that every day for the next or for the last eight years. Almost a million people all over the world get it. It's the most sto for the last eight years. Almost a million people all over the world get it. It's the most Stoics that have ever existed, probably cumulatively in human history.

And that's all wonderful and cool. I'm very grateful for it. But what I'm actually grateful for, the powerful thing about the Daily Stoic, has been what it's done for me. The practice of writing something, thinking about the Stoic philosophy every single something, thinking about the stoic philosophy every single day, that is the practice. That's what we're doing. Seneca's letters

to his friend Lucilius, this is what they're doing. They're exchanging, he says, one thing a day. He says, let's find one quote, one insight, one story. He says, something that fortifies us against poverty or death or adversity. And that's what the process has been for me. Stoicism is something that you journal about, that you talk about, that you share with other people, you discuss with other people, you come to lectures like this and then you share with other people. It's this exchange. The idea is going over it over and over and over again till it seeps into you, till it becomes kind of a muscle memory. That's what Marcus was doing

here in Meditations. This work isn't for us. This work was for him. It's just an accidental byproduct that we get it. This book is Marcus Aurelius not talking about Stoicism, but but practicing stoicism for himself. We're supposed to be doing this, we're talking about it, and thinking about it, and reading about it, and applying it, and starting that whole process over and over and over again, so that in these big moments, in the moments of difficulty, or toughness, or interestingness, whatever you want to call it, that maybe we can apply a little bit of it and we can get better as we go.

We can get better as we go. As we wrap up here, I wanted to give you, I think, what the most important practice, a practice I always try to leave people with from the Stoics, which is this idea of memento mori, right? Remember that you are mortal. The Roman emperor had someone whisper this in their ear at their highest moments, remember that you are mortal,

that you are not a god, that you are a human being. I carry a ring with me, I'm wearing it right now. It says memento mori, and on the inside has a quote from Marcus. He says, let that determine what you do and say and think. You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think. Of course, we all know we're going to die on some level, right?

Obviously, everyone who's ever born will die. That's the one prophecy that's never failed. And yet, the Stokes would say, we get it wrong to think of death as this thing in the future, right? It's not some distant thing that will happen to you when you're old. I mean, it can happen to you at any moment. It's not some distant thing that will happen to you when you're old.

It can happen to you at any moment. But Seneca would say we have to see death as something that's ever-present. In the midst of life, we are in death. Not just because people can die, things like plagues or pandemics can happen, tragedies can happen. But he would say that the time that passes belongs to death. That once time passes, it's dead to us forever.

As we kill time, time kills us. He says we're dying every minute, we're dying every day. So the reason we have to say no, right, the reason we have to design our lives, the reason we have to be conscious of where we're going and what we're doing so we don't know how long we have. Don't know how long we have. The Stoics say we have to balance the books of life each day to make sure we're spending this time wisely. We're making a positive difference with it.

We're using the gift for what it is. It's a gift. And I was in Waverly Cemetery today. Look, if that's where you go when you die, I guess there's worse things that could happen to you. But all those people, right? All those people, they saw death as something that would happen eventually, inevitably, and then it came to them one day all too soon, right? As it does to all of us. It comes as a surprise, even though we know it's always going to be there.

Maybe we thought we were too healthy, too important, or we thought we're working on something that's going to outlive us. It doesn't do Marcus Aurelius any good that we're talking about him, you know. He says, people who long for posthumous fame forget that they won't be around to enjoy it. And he says, the people in the future

are also stupid and annoying. And the point is, Marcus really survives and endures, not because that's what he chased, but because of what he did with the time that he had and who he was with that time. And that has to be enough, right? Dying every minute, we're dying every day. You could leave life right now,

let that determine what you do and say and think. And that's the very morbid note I wanted to end with all of you tonight. So thank you very much. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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