The Daily Stoic - The Most Important Things You Need To Stop Doing

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

We’re not the first culture to burn out and dream of getting away from it all. But the Stoics understood why the life you’re trying to escape has a way of following you.Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m548wbKcA3U🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail--Stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. Visit ironwall.com/DAILYSTOIC and request a free Risk Assessment to see exactly how exposed your executives are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are not the first burnout culture. Every culture that has ever existed has worked too hard, has been too stressed out, has wanted to get away from it all. You see this in the writings of the Stoics. Two thousand years ago, Seneca talked about this very place, the Bay of Naples, which is where the rich Romans would go to escape the stressful lives they had made for themselves. They wanted to see the country. They wanted to tour to the old sites. They wanted to lay at the beach.

But what Seneca understood and what I want to talk about in today's video, some better strategies for building balance in our lives. Because it's not feasible to go on vacation all the time. It's not feasible to live in a fantasy life. And as Marks Reelis says in meditations, we have within us all the things we need at this very moment to feel peaceful, to feel good, to feel still, to get to that place of Adaraxia,

which is exactly what the Stoics aspire to do. If you want more tranquility in your life, you have to do less, Marcus really says. And the magical thing when you do less, when you eliminate the inessential, when you stop saying yes to things that don't matter, when you stop getting caught up and busy work and nonsense. He says you get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Your creative work, getting outside, gratitude, all the things that matter in life you do better when you do less stuff. So much of what we do, it's because we think we have to because other people are doing it because we're a, afraid to say no. No, you have to do less. Because when you do less, you do more, better. Zeno says that well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. Sometimes we get

intimidated, we get overwhelmed by all the things that we have to do. And really what we have to do is the next right thing. Make the right choice in front of you. Do that little thing. Do it well. Do it as if it matters. Concentrate on this task in front of you like a Roman. Do it like it's the last thing you are doing in your life. If it's not worth doing, why are you doing it? And if it is worth doing, it's worth doing well. You just made me think of this new study that came out in science or really a meta-analysis, which is one of the two most prestigious scientific journals in the world, that looked at careers of, I think it was about 26,000 athletes, musicians, and scientists.

And their main finding was that the things that led to peak youth performance were negatively associated with peak adult performance. So if you wanted the best youth performance, you specialize early, basically. and really narrowly. And if you wanted the best adult performance, you start broader. So the Nobel laureates in the study, for example, progressed more slowly in their careers than peers

because they were more interdisciplinary early on. So they got 10 years more slowly, all this. You know, the athletes tended to have a sampling period. And they cited a lot of the studies that I cite in range, and plus some newer ones. But there were three main buckets that they divided the benefits into. One was what you were mentioning, match quality,

the degree of fit between the thing you picked and who you are. And the first of all, the more things you've tried, the better is going to be your match quality. And that's hugely important for performance and your sense of fulfillment. The second bucket was generalized learning advantage when you've done sort of a variety of different things. Like if you've played three different attacking sports, for example, that's where you have to judge bodies or balls. You'll have an advantage for learning subsequent skills after that. It's like kids who are bilingual have some advantage for new languages.

And the third was resistance to physical and psychological injury. Basically resistance to burnout and overuse injury. Resilience. And it wasn't even about the total. volume of activity you were doing. It was about like diversifying it. So those were kind of three main buckets that just came out in this this like kind of blockbuster science report. Well, this athlete said to me once that her coach, because she was pushing herself too hard in practice. He was like, do you want to be fast now or you want to be fast later? Yeah, it's tough.

And it's like, do you want to be the best at 17? Yeah. Or do you want to be the best at 57? There's this guy named Ian Yates I used to talk to who he was what's called a performance pathway director, I think. Basically, like, helping a talent development pipeline in UK sports. And he was saying one of the things that was starting to happen was parents were coming in and saying, I want my kid doing what that gold medalist is doing now, not what that gold medalist was doing when they were 12, which is totally different. Right, right, right, right. So you want to skip ahead. Yes. But doesn't work that way. Yeah. And again, when do you want to peak? When do you want to peak at 16 when the benefits aren't there? You want to peak? There's different processes you're trying to set in motion. I mean, these days, I could

see someone making an argument that, like, no, I want my kid to peak. when they're 13 for some like, they're never going to go pro, but this is when they get the, this is when they get a scholarship. When I lived in New York, I don't live there anymore, but the last place I lived,

there was a U8 travel soccer team that met across the street for me. I don't think he's a human being in the world that thinks seven-year-olds can't find good enough competition in a city of nine million people, but they have to travel. Right.

But that's like an adult locking in their customer pipeline, right? It's like you're not on U-8, you can't be on U-9, so none of that stuff is about optimal development. Right. And then none of it has anything, is anyone putting any thought

into what is contributing to the most well-adjusted, happy, you know, thriving individual? Not in this country. There are other places like Norway where they just blew another, they just won 50% more gold medals than Winter Olympics,

but they win a lot of summer stuff too. They won, I think it was two Olympics to go beach volleyball, which you don't usually associate with Norway, but they have some of the best soccer, tennis, runners, golf, and they don't allow sorting of kids before age 13,

because they view mass participation as aligned with the lead participation. It's its own goal, everyone participating. And they view it as aligned with elite participation because more people are in. And you get people, you know, they get to try different things, so they fit better and all this kind of stuff. And you're not deselecting kids so early. Right.

Because pathway directors will talk about the fast risers and the slow bakers. The kids who are like six feet tall when they're 10. And then, but most of the what they call serial champions are slow bakers who you did not pick out as that prodigy early on. And the problem is if you push selection too young, you de select those people. And then they don't even have a chance to kind of develop. before they've even gotten a chance to get it. Yeah, that's right. So I think I just saw like Khan Knoopful,

who maybe will win NBA. You're saying that he was not into basketball early on, even though he was from a basketball family. There's a book behind you. I was just thinking about when I think of you, one of my favorite books, Range. Have you read Range? I have not.

Oh, so it's the subtitle is how generous triumph in a specialized world. What's interesting is like, obviously to be great the NBA, any professional athlete that you have to be super specialized. Years and years, 10,000 hours of practice. But at the same time, you're not one of those guys who, as Kobe was, Kobe's all basketball, you were not all basketball. You had a range of interests and you explored those. I'm curious how guitar, music, language, reading, all the other things that you did,

how did that make you a better basketball player and how is that sort of informed even now when you think about with your kids? I always, I always had other things, you know, language, guitar and music came a little later. I had given up. I gave up one of my mid-20s, early 20s. That's why I, you know, went back to it. I always wanted to do some things to take my mind off of basketball. Sure. Right? It's a lot of flights, a lot of bus rides. So, you know, you need some hobbies. I didn't think of it this way, but I had a friend that told me, your hobbies lead to greatness. I always thought that fascinating and just that made me look back on things. And I did these things just to kind of get my mind off of the game. Sure. I was all in the basketball. That is all I did,

but I also had other interests. And one of the things that I found was, like, so for instance, during the playoffs, I would cook. The day before a game, I would cook dinner because you have to concentrate on the meal or it's going to suck. Right. You know, so I'm looking at the time. I'm checking the meat. I'm making sure I don't burn, boil the water over. It's a thing that I have to focus on.

Sure. You know, because if I don't, my brain is going to start going, and then we're going to start thinking about tomorrow, and I'm going to be back in that rabbit hole. Which is fine. Sure. You don't want to be there all the time. And one of the things I found is that once I start relaxing, in my cooking or in me playing the guitar or in me studying for something in language, I see some weird connection to where I think about basketball. But it would be like, oh, okay, I could put that to the side.

It's like it was this crazy thing of no, you know, no judgment. Wow, I never thought of that before. This is the move I'm going to do tomorrow. I got it. Yeah, sometimes when you're thinking about something else, You create room for your brain sort of subconsciously to solve some problem that we talked about willful will. You know, if you're, I got to solve this, I got to solve this, I got to solve, you're not going to make any progress. Yeah, yeah.

And I think I read something somewhere. Like Einstein played the violin if he ran into a problem. He just played violin for days, weeks, hours, whatever it took. So I always thought I thought that pretty fascinating. And that's kind of what I started using my hobbies for. Because the grind will grind you down if you don't have. anything to refresh. In meditations, Marks really says,

ambition is tying your success to what other people do or say, right? If they select you, if they approve of you, if they cheer for you. He says, sanity is tying it to your own actions. Right, that's the problem. So much of what we want, what we're aspiring to, what our goals are, are not in our control, as Epictetus would say, but in fact, they're the opposite. They're handing over that control, that judgment

or evaluation to other people. And so when your ambition shifts more internally towards what you control, towards what you do to who you were while you did it, you're empowered, right, and you're more self-sufficient. John Wooden said something like success is peace of mind, which is the direct result of knowing that you made the best effort to do your best to become the best you're capable of becoming. And obviously, John Wooden cares a lot about winning and he wins a lot.

But you have this bigger, more encompassing, definition of what your success is and who you're trying to be, how you judge yourself. So you can have a team that wins that you're disappointed in. You can have a team that loses that you couldn't be more proud of, right? And I try to get to a place, and I think I am at this place with my books where some of the books I'm most proud of have sold the fewest copies and the books that I'm, while proud of, I'm not changed by or puffed up by their success, because I've done better since, right? I'm more focused on other things.

I'm prouder of other things in other projects. So you do your work, you focus on what you can focus on, and you leave the rest to God, the gods, luck, the market, right? The whims of the universe, whatever you want to call it, you leave it there. We tend to think of discipline as working harder and doing more. Yeah. And it's much more subtle than that. Oh, no.

I mean, God, if you want to win, you have to say no to so much, it feels uncomfortable. Yes. And I do it nonstop. I mean, the idea that doing more is going to make you win is I think why so many entrepreneurs are miserable. Yeah. Because they have bought into the idea, if I just do one more, I will become better, bigger, richer, etc. And in fact, it's usually what are the 10 things you need to stop doing right now that are burning up time that you can't even picture. And what are the two things that if you did them would make everything else meaningless?

And if you find those, then you really win. Yeah, and the discipline to understand there's an infinite amount of money in the world and a finite amount of time. And which do you value more? What is the point of being successful if you can't use it to buy time and you can't use it to live the actual life that you want? There is this kind of insane, like to be an entrepreneur, you have to have a good sense of delayed gratification. But you'll end up missing the whole point if you endlessly. delay gratification, right? Like, if you never get to enjoy it, if you're sort of in harness your whole life, or if you're like, yes, it's miserable, I hate this thing, but at some point I'll sell it,

and then I'll be happy. You don't know that that's true. And you might not get to that point. It's actually a good, like, frame, that idea of are you in harness or are you out? Are you free in the field or are you under plow? And I think, you know, if you're an entrepreneur and you're, you're thinking about that. It's like how much time do you actually spend under detention, you know, in that harness? And then how much time do you spend on long walks, on vacation? One of the most useful things I ever did to have better discipline about enjoying life, because that's not my natural state, is getting married. And like, I think partnership and marriage is one of the best ways possible to offset.

Exactly. Exactly. They're like, what are you doing? Exactly. Yeah, this is crazy. Yeah. And it's, it's, everybody talks about, oh, the old ball and chain, or they hold me back. Or they. I go, that's the point. They also tether you to reality. 100%. You were sounding like an insane person right now. And then they're also saying, well, what about me?

You know, what about when are we going to live this life that you promised? Yeah. And so I actually think, I know that a lot of people today are like, well, you know, the best partner is the one that supports everything you do unequivocally all the time. And being married to an entrepreneur is such a blessing. No, it's not. Being married to an entrepreneur can be extremely miserable. Yeah. And extremely self-focused.

and the spouses that sign up for that, like, they need a medal too. And so, and, you know, my husband is in the game with me, but he is also the very first one to say, life is way bigger than this. And he has actually seen life or death and to pull you out of the moment where you're obsessed about something like a P&L or a spreadsheet that you're not going to remember in 50 years. Chances are, if you are driven, if you're talented, if you're successful, if you've built something, And chances are you need more of a check than you do an enabler. It's so true.

That's a good point, actually. You don't need encouragement. You have plenty of that. People think you want a board of directors that lets you do whatever you want. You think you want complete corporate control. And that tends historically not to go well. That's actually not the role of the board of the directors. The board of directors, yes, it's a committee.

And committees can be short-sided. But committees do tend to prevent you from driving off of a cliff or burning yourself out or doing something that is illegal or very irresponsible. Their job is to be like, that's not a good idea. Do you know what Thomas Edison said when his factory, this factory was burning down? He grabbed his son, shell-shocked, their life's work, his inheritance going up in flames. And he said, go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again.

And supposedly he paces up and down watching this surreal, fire, which is throwing all these weird colors and heat up into the air. And he starts to repeat that line from Kipling's if about meeting triumph and disaster all the same. And he really means this. The next day he tells reporters, you know, I've been through things like this before. He says it prevents an old man from being afflicted with Onwi. He says it's going to prevent me from getting bored. And in fact, the final act of his life is throwing himself into the rebuilding, into more inventions, into more work. He comes to this crossroads and he decides, instead of taking the route of despair and disappointment and grievance takes the route of inspiration and urgency

and renewed focus. It's this stoic idea of amorphati. You can't do anything about the fire. You can't put it out. It's gone. All of it's going to burn down. That's what technology was at the time. But you can choose how you respond. You can choose what you make of it. You can choose what you turn it into. You can choose the story you tell yourself about it. That is stoicism. We don't control what happens, we control how we respond to what happens. We don't run away from our fate. We embrace our fate and we allow it to make us better in ways that we couldn't have possibly ever imagined. And that happened right here. Let's use Memento Mori as fuel, not fear. Understanding that you're going to die someday, that life is short, should give you urgency, should give you priority. A daily

reminder of death, it isn't morbid. It is the fastest and most effective cure. for procrastination. Markslerless talks about building your life action by action. It says no one can stop you from that. No one can stop you from doing that thing you know you should be doing right in front of you.