The Daily Stoic - The One Word That Will Set You Free

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

Saying no isn’t selfish; it is a powerful act of self-respect. Listen to the audiobook of Stillness Is The Key narrated by Ryan Holiday on Audible: https://www.audible.com/📕 Pick up a signed copy of Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday at https://store.dailystoic.com/🎙️ 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 Podcast. It's not the dark you have to be afraid of. It's what's hiding within it. The Shaw Festival presents Wait Until Dark. In a New York apartment, a blind woman becomes the target of ruthless criminals. As night falls, she must use all her wits to survive. Don't miss this heart-stopping thriller, Wait Until Dark at the Shaw. For tickets, go to shawfest.com. 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I hope this is a quiet Sunday for you. And if it's not a quiet Sunday, why? Why don't you have any quiet days in your life? Why sometimes do the weekend days, I know I feel this is apparent, the weekend days are busier than the weekdays because you left stuff till the weekend or or you overcommitted, or you're running birthday party, birthday party, soccer practice, dinner with the in-laws, and then you're just like, you go into Monday,

you're not rested, you're even more tired, right? It's tough. So for today's episode, I wanted to bring you some thoughts on saying, no, this is something I talk a lot about. I've told you about the signs that I have in my office, the mementos that helped me do this. But back in 2017, 2018, when I was writing Stillness is the Key, I was still sort of working out

my philosophy of this. Cause it's tough at the beginning of your career, all you're doing is yes, yes, yes. You're jumping on every opportunity to get to a point where hopefully you can start being a little bit more discriminating and you can say no. And that was right about that transition for me. So I wrote this chapter in Stillness is the Key

about this idea, about the power of saying no and how you have to say no, how you have to create work-life balance, have to create work-life boundaries and break free from the things that steal that are most precious resource, which is our time. So I'm gonna bring you that chapter today. This is the Say No chapter from part three in Stillness is the Key. You can grab signed copies at store.dailystoic.com

or if you like me reading it, this is from the audiobook. So you can grab the audiobook of Stillness is the Key anywhere you get your audiobooks. I'll link to the audible link here as well. And I hope you can say no to some stuff today and the rest of the week and the rest of the year. You deserve some freedom and autonomy. You deserve to say no.

And I'm saying that to you as much as I am saying it to myself. Enjoy. Say no. The advantages of non-action few in the world attain these. The Tao De Jing. When Fabius was dispatched to lead the Roman legions against Hannibal, he did nothing. He did not attack. He did not race out to drive the terrifying invader out of Italy and back to Africa.

You might think that this was a sign of weakness. Certainly most of Rome did, but in fact it was all part of Fabius' strategy. Hannibal was far from home. He was losing men to the elements and could not easily replace them. Fabius believed that if Rome just held out and did not engage in costly battles, they would win. But the mob couldn't handle that kind of deliberate restraint. We are the strongest army in the world, his critics said.

We don't sit around doing nothing when someone tries to attack us. So while Fabius was away attending a religious ceremony, they pressured one of his commanders to attack. It did not go well. He ran straight into a trap. Fabius had to rush to his rescue. And even then, this commander was hailed as a hero for doing something, while Fabius was labeled a coward for holding himself back.

When his term ended, the Roman assemblies voted to abandon what is now known as a Fabian strategy of mostly avoiding battle and wearing Hannibal down in favor for greater aggression and more action. It didn't work. Only after the bloodbath at the Battle of Cannae, in which the Romans attacked Hannibal and lost nearly their entire army in a horrific rout, did people finally begin to understand Fabius's wisdom. Now they could see that what had looked like an excess of caution was in fact a

brilliant method of warfare. He had been buying time and giving his opponent a chance to destroy himself. Only now and not a moment too soon were they ready to listen to him. While most great Romans were given honorific titles that highlighted their great victories or accomplishments in foreign lands, Fabius was later given one that stands out. Fabius Conctator, the Delayer. He was special for what he didn't do, for what he waited to do, and has stood as an important example to all leaders since, especially the ones feeling pressure from themselves or their followers to be bold or take immediate action. In baseball, you make a name for yourself by swinging for the fences, particularly for players from small, poor countries.

Showing your power as a home run hitter is how you get noticed by scouts and coaches. As they say in the Dominican Republic, you don't walk off the island, meaning you hit your way off. It's like life. You can't benefit from opportunities you don't try to take advantage of. But Dr. Jonathan Fader, an elite sports psychologist who has spent nearly a decade with the New York Mets, has talked about just how problematic this lesson is for rookie players in the majors. They built their reputations and therefore their identities on swinging at every pitch they thought they could hit. And now they're facing the best pitchers in the world.

Suddenly aggression is a weakness, not a strength. Now they have to get up there in front of millions of people getting paid millions of dollars and mostly not swing the bat. They have to wait for the perfect pitch. What they have to learn, what the great hitter Sadaharu Oh himself learned in a series of complicated batting exercises demanded by his Zen master and hitting coach, was the power of waiting and the power of precision, the power of void. Because that's what makes for a real pro.

A truly great hitter, not just a swinger, needs quick hands and powerful hips, to be sure, but they must also possess the power of wu-wei, or non-action. Wu-wei is the ability to hold the bat back, waiting until the batter sees the perfect pitch. It is the yogi in meditation. They're physically still so they can be active on a mental and spiritual level. That was also Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It might have seemed like he wasn't doing enough, that he wasn't rushing to destroy his opponent, but he was rightly carving out the space and time to think and time and space for the Russians to do the same thing. Practicing Wu Wei was precisely what Tiger Woods lost the ability to do as his work and sex addictions took control.

A disciplined action. That's what John Cage called doing nothing in the performance instructions on 433. You don't solve a maze by rushing through. You have to stop and think. You have to walk slowly and carefully, raining in your energy. Otherwise you'll get hopelessly lost. The same is true for the problems we face in life. The green light is a powerful symbol in our culture. We forget what Mr. Rogers

was trying to make us see, that the yellow light and the red light are just as important. Slow down. Stop. One recent study found that subjects would rather give themselves an electric shock than experience boredom for even a few minutes. Then we wonder why people do so many stupid things. We bet you didn't know. Our new train's panoramic windows are ideal for contemplating whether texting them back so soon was the best decision. Get on board. Via Rail. Love the way. There is a haunting clip of Joan Rivers

well into her 70s, already one of the most accomplished and respected and talented comedians of all time, in which she is asked why she keeps working, why she is always on the road, always looking for more gigs. Telling the interviewer about the fear that drives her, she holds up an empty calendar. If my book ever looked like this, it would mean that nobody wants me and that everything I ever tried to do in my life didn't work. Nobody cared and I've been totally forgotten. It's not just that there was

never enough for Joan, it's that our best and most lasting work comes when we take things slow, when we pick our shots and wait for the right pitches. Somebody who thinks they're nothing and doesn't matter because they're not doing something for even a few days is depriving themselves of stillness, yes, pitches. Somebody who thinks they're nothing and doesn't matter because they're not doing something for even a few days is depriving themselves of stillness, yes, but they are also closing themselves off from a higher plane of performance that comes out of it. Spiritually, that's hard. Physically, that's harder still. You have to make yourself say no. You have to make yourself not take the stage. A weaker Fabius would not have been able to resist attacking Hannibal, and all of history

might have turned out differently. A long-distance runner who can't pace himself, a money manager who can't wait out a bear market. If they can't learn the art of Wu Wei in their professions, they won't succeed. If you can't do it in your life, forget about your success. You'll burn out your body, and you don't get another one of those. We should look fearfully, even sympathetically, at the people who have become slaves to their calendars, who require a staff of ten to handle their ongoing projects, whose lives seem to resemble a fugitive fleeing one scene for the next. There is no stillness there, it's servitude.

Each of us needs to get better at saying no. As in, no, sorry, I'm not available. No, sorry, that sounds great, but I'd rather not. No, I'm going to wait and see. No, I don't like that idea. No, I don't need that. I'm going to make the most of what I have. No, because if I said yes to you, I'd have to say yes to everyone. Maybe it's not the most virtuous thing to say, no, sorry, I can't, when you really can, but just don't want to. But can you really, can you really afford to do it? And does it not harm other people if you're constantly stretched too thin? A pilot gets to say, sorry, I'm on standby,

as an excuse to get out of things. Doctors and firemen and police officers get to use being on call as a shield. But are we not on call in our own lives? Isn't there something or someone that we're preserving our full capacities for? Are our own bodies not on call for our families, for our self-improvement, for our own work? Always think about what you're really being asked to give, because the answer is often a piece of your life, usually in exchange for something you don't even want.

Remember, that's what time is. It's your life, it's your flesh and blood that you can never get back. In every situation ask, what is it? Why does it matter? Do I need it? Do I want it? What are the hidden costs?

Will I look back from the distant future and be glad I did it? If I never knew about it at all, if the request was lost in the mail, if they hadn't been able to pin me down and ask me, would I even notice that I missed out? When we know what to say no to, we can say yes to the things that matter. 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. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on wondery.com slash survey. We bet you didn't know. Our new quieter trains are great for listening to that self-help podcast you lied about actually listening to. Get on board. Via Rail.

Love the way.