The Daily Stoic - The Stoic Way To Survive 2026

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, it's Ryan. I try not to make too many puns on my last name because I've been hearing it my whole life. But if you want to give a holiday gift of me, Ryan Holiday, and the Daily Stoic, well, you can. We have a special offer. If you want to give Daily Stoic premium as a gift, you can do that. Your friends, your family members, coworkers, whoever you give it to can get ad-free episodes, early access, and exclusive bonus content. Plus, we'll even throw in premium episodes of the Daily Dad Podcast. You can get both premium plans together for 25% off. It's a limited offer available now through the end of the holidays. That's through December 31st.

Starting point is 00:00:42 You can click below to get it for them today. Happy holidays. 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, audiobooks 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.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Thank you for listening. How can we be better in 2026? How can we do better and be better? How can we be more virtuous in 20206? That's what I want to talk about tonight. How we can try to do and be better in the year ahead. Because that's what the philosophy is really about. That's what it's for. The idea from the Stoics is that it will be a chance to practice those key virtues, courage, discipline, and justice, and wisdom. So we should start with courage. Now, Physical courage, we're pretty familiar with. Courage to run into a burning building onto a battlefield to risk life and limb. You might need physical courage in 2026. Hopefully not, right? Even if that's your job, I hope it's a really boring year and you don't have to do it. But you will definitely need moral courage in 2026.

Starting point is 00:02:21 Every day demands moral courage. Actually, Seneca says sometimes even to live is an act of courage. to just keep going, to keep trying, to show up, to be yourself in a world of conformity and sameness. These are the things that we're talking about when we're talking about moral courage, right? The courage to speak up, the courage to speak out, the courage to bet on yourself, to think differently, to blow the whistle, the courage to be creative, the courage to get in front of a crowd and talk to people. I will tell you, I did not become a writer because I like to talk to large groups of people. That's pretty much the opposite of what I like and why I became a writer

Starting point is 00:03:02 in the first place as I thought I wouldn't have to do anything like this. So moral courage is that, right? It's getting out of your comfort zone and doing hard things. Although in most cases, you're not actually going to die doing those acts of moral courage can feel just as scary and as dangerous. There's a story I love about Ulysses S. Grant. the Civil War. He's learned this lesson, but he's still terrified, as I think any normal person would be. He's in Missouri, and he's sent against a Confederate army led by Colonel Thomas Harris. And Grant is terrified. He says that if he had any moral courage at all, he would have turned around and retreated. He was too scared even to quit, and he just kept going. The countryside

Starting point is 00:03:51 was cleared out for miles. There wasn't a sound. There wasn't a single. living thing, as if this terrible battle was about to break out, as if he was marching steadily towards his doom. And then he got to the place where Harris was supposed to be. And you know what Grant found? He found that Harris had already retreated. And he said, it occurred to me in this moment that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. And he said, I'd never thought about it from this perspective before. But he said, it was a lesson I never forgot. afterwards. Everyone is scared. Things aren't as scary as they seem. These are the lessons that we learn putting ourselves out there again and again. Everyone is nervous. Like the person that is

Starting point is 00:04:39 interviewing you for the job, they were not looking forward to that meeting either. Not only are they nervous, but you know what they're doing? They're desperate to fill that position. And you going in there scared isn't making it seem like you're the solution to that problem. Everyone is scared. Things aren't as scary as they seem. And that's what courage really is. And it's, again, a practice, a thing we have to do. It's not a virtue if you're not overcoming that initial feeling of trepidation or anxiety. This idea of courage as an action, I think, leads pretty naturally to the next virtue, which would be the virtue of discipline. Do you know how Seneca brought in each new year? He rang in each new year, he said, as a lover of cold baths. He would celebrate the new

Starting point is 00:05:33 year by throwing himself in the Virgo aqueduct. He would take a cold plunge in the canal. He said, just as I might make a resolution to do some reading or write a speech, he says, I want to start the year off with a cold plunge. Now, why would he do this? Sure, there are supposedly some health benefits to cold plunges. Actually, I did one this morning. I did a sauna on Lake Washington, and then I jumped in to the lake. It was 45 degrees in the water. It was quite cold. As I said, they claim that, you know, this is good for your circulation. They claim that cold plunges are good for boosting your immune system, reducing inflammation for all sorts of wonderful things. Maybe. Could be horseshit. I don't know. I don't really care.

Starting point is 00:06:20 To me, the benefit is in that it's hard and unpleasant, and I really don't want to do it. That's the benefit. The benefit is in doing the thing and then how you feel after, right? Seneca says, we treat the body rigorously so that it is not disobedient to the mind. That's the muscle that it's helping, the part of you that doesn't want to crank the knob in the shower towards cold, right? The muscle that says, I do hard, unpleasant things, and I have the power. over myself to make myself do it. That's the benefit of the cold plunge. In 2025, I decided I would

Starting point is 00:06:58 run the original Greek marathon from Marathon to Athens. It's roughly 26 miles. I did 27 because I got lost. But I was by myself and I'm pretty sure from the video suffering from heat stroke. I arrived in the Olympic Stadium in the middle of Athens. I had to wait in line to buy ticket and then I got in and I promptly threw up all over the stadium, just representing America as a global ambassador, you know. But it was really hard, right? As you can imagine, it was extremely hard. I hit a wall in the middle of it. I hit another wall towards the end of it. As I said, I got terribly lost. It was really hard. But I not only have experience with that exact position, like when you feel like you can't go any further and you're not sure why you would

Starting point is 00:07:48 and no one is making you? Do you have, in that Kipling poem, you know, nothing left but the will that says hold on, right? That part, you want to have that where you hit the wall and you go, I'm going to keep going even though I really, really, really don't want to. I experienced it there in that marathon. I've experienced it in writing. I've experienced building businesses. I've experienced it in my marriage.

Starting point is 00:08:13 I've experienced it as a parent. You get to that place where you don't think you have anything left. But you do. So pick something for this year that's a big stretch that maybe you'll be able to do. Maybe you won't. Training for it will be good, right? That will stretch your capacity. Getting there and then not making it. And then the regret and the guilt that you feel when you go, oh yeah, it's always hard. It didn't feel any better when I stopped either. That's what we're learning when we do these hard things. This is what the New Year, New You challenge that Daily Stoic does every year is built around, right? They're called challenges for a reason.

Starting point is 00:08:51 It's not 21 days of Stoic affirmations, 21 days of Stoic, nice, pleasant, fun things to do. They're challenges. They're supposed to be challenging. They're supposed to be uncomfortable. They're supposed to be painful. They're supposed to be weird. They're supposed to get you out of your comfort zone. Because that's where all the growth is on the other side of doing those hard things.

Starting point is 00:09:13 things. And that's what I want you to cultivate in the year ahead. And I would say not just like the hard things day-to-day. That is that day-to-day discipline. But I'd also say it's good to pick something ambitious and big that's challenging for 2026. Something that like at the end of the year, 10 years in the future, when you think back to 2026, you'll be like, that's the year I climbed that mountain. That's the year I set that mile time. That's the year. I lifted that heavy thing. That's the year me and my friends did X, Y, or Z. Now that leads us to the third virtue,

Starting point is 00:09:52 which should be the virtue of justice. I do think it's interesting how selfish most of our resolutions are, right? I wanna lose weight, I wanna run a race, I wanna stop eating this, I wanna clean out the garage, I wanna find a new job, I wanna start dating again, whatever it is, right? Our resolutions, our goals for the year,

Starting point is 00:10:12 They're always about us. They're about what we're going to do. Now, this might sound a little bit like stoicism, right? Focus on what you control, focus on what you're going to do. And that's true. But if you're only thinking about you or a philosophy that only has you think about you, that's also kind of a recipe for being an asshole. And as I've said before, stoicism is not there to help you be a better sociopath.

Starting point is 00:10:37 On the contrary, it's designed to make you better, more caring, more empathetic, a better contributor to the thing that Marks-Ruiz talks about 80 times in meditations, which is the common good. Stoics believe that we were made for each other. That was our purpose here on this planet. Marks-Ruels says that the fruit of the good life is good character and acts for the common good. We knew it was a Halloween street when we moved there. And then it has quickly become a Thanksgiving and then a Christmas street. Everyone's vying to outdo each other with their decorations.

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Starting point is 00:12:22 One of my heroes is this guy Thomas Clarkson. Now, maybe a few of you know who he is. It's a shame that not every person in this room does. He should be one of the most famous people ever. Thomas Clarkson, in 1785, enters an essay competition at Oxford. where he's a student. And the question is basically like, should a human be able to buy and sell other human beings?

Starting point is 00:12:46 Now, this might seem like a settled question, but it was not in 1785. And in fact, Clarkson, hoping to stand out in the essay competition, takes the contrarian view that, no, you shouldn't be able to own another human being. And he's surprised when he wins. He wins the competition, he accepts his prize, and as he's heading off to London,

Starting point is 00:13:09 to start his life, he's walking his horse between Oxford and London. A thought occurs to him. He says, what if I'm right? Not just what if this was an interesting homework assignment, an interesting intellectual question, but what if it's true? Then the second bolt of lightning hits him. Well, if it's true, someone should do something about it. And then the third bolt of lightning, if someone should do something about it, maybe that someone should be me. Here's the crazy thing. He did.

Starting point is 00:13:37 maybe the oldest institution in the history of humanity goes away in Thomas Clarkson's lifetime because of Thomas Clarkson's work. He convenes 12 other forward-thinking people at a print shop in London. They start a little movement. And that abolitionist movement first ends the slave trade in the British Empire. And along the way, it creates the first consumer boycott, some of the first petitions, some of the first activist marketing, and in the campaign that he creates the allies that he develops, the research that he does, some of those famous drawings, have you ever seen that famous drawing of what the inside of a slave ship looks like? All these hundreds of years later, that came from research that Thomas Clarkson did. Part of the reason slavery was

Starting point is 00:14:28 allowed to exist is that people didn't want to think about what it actually meant and looked like. And so much of his campaign was about awareness. He unearthed the terrible human toll, not just on people who were being bought and sold, but also the consequences for the people buying and selling them. For the terrible toll it took on the economy, for the terrible toll it took on the sailors who were impressed into working onto the ships. Just what a horrible, horrible economic industry it was. And as a result, first, the slave trade is abolished.

Starting point is 00:15:02 He starts small than slavery itself. He, within his life, leads millions of people to freedom. He literally changes the world, right? He changes the world in a way that Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, whose life is influenced by the writings of a slave, is not able to do. Right? What are you going to do this year that's not about you, that's about having impact for other people? Those are the accomplishments that when the other things,

Starting point is 00:15:32 fade away when time passes, you're going to be most proud of. There's actually a line in one of my favorite novels, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The woman, she says, it's much more important to dig a half-buried crow out of the ground than to write a petition to the president, right? You can shout into the void. You can try to solve these enormous, intractable, impossible problems or you can do something kind and decent right in the sphere in the place that you live. We don't control most of what's happening in the world, unfortunately, but we control our own actions. Last virtue, we're almost done. I don't think it's possible to become wise in 26. I don't think wisdom is something you can achieve in a year, but you can get wiser, right?

Starting point is 00:16:22 Wisdom is not a thing you possess. It is a thing you are moving closer to. It's kind of like the horizon, right? You're taking steps towards it, but you never actually arrive. But you can look back and see how far that you have come. To me, wisdom is a byproduct, doing the right things, the right way, over and over again. Actually, I think the founding story of Stoicism is in a way illustrative of this. Zeno's and a merchant in the Mediterranean. He's traveling from port to port. At some point, he stops at the temple of Apollo and he asks the oracle, what is the secret to the good life? She tells him you will begin to become wise and you start to have conversations with the dead. He doesn't know what this means until

Starting point is 00:17:03 suffers a shipwreck, ends up in Athens penniless, and he hears a bookseller reading aloud something from Socrates. And there he realizes, oh, that's what talking to the dead is. That's what reading is. And he resolves to become a philosopher. So he asks the bookseller, where can I find a teacher? And there walking by is a man named Cretes, a cynic philosopher who becomes Zeno's mentor. Krati's nickname in Athens was the door opener, because that's what great teachers do. They open doors.

Starting point is 00:17:32 And so one of the first lessons that Kratis gives, Zeno is actually about courage. Zeno is self-conscious. He has a little bit of imposter syndrome. He's always thinking about what other people are thinking about him. So Kratis gives him a big, heavy pot of lentils and asks them to carry it through the marketplace. And at the busiest place in the Agora,

Starting point is 00:17:52 Kratis jumps out and wax Zeno with his staff, shattering the pot and covering him in lentils. And Zeno is mortified and he goes to run off and Kratis stops him and he goes, My boy, why are you running away? Nothing terrible has befallen you. Trying to get him to not be so self-conscious. In a way, I think this captures so many of those sort of basic traits that go into the acquisition of wisdom. Travel, asking great questions, what's the secret to the good life? Reading, talking with the dead. That's what philosophy is.

Starting point is 00:18:21 teachers and mentors. And then, of course, a kind of fearlessness. You are not going to learn. You will not become wise if you are a sensitive little snowflake. Doesn't want to hurt anyone else's feelings or have your own feelings be hurt. That will help you understand. Truman's line was the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know. So how are we studying the past? How are we talking with the dead to help understand this moment that we're in? But our information diet is essential. I think too many of us are violating Zeno's rule of two ears and one mouth for a reason. We think that social media is about what we're throwing out in the world as opposed to what we can take from it. How do we cultivate and improve our information diet?

Starting point is 00:19:06 That should be the goal. What are the things you're going to stop following, the things you're going to stop listening to, the sources you're going to turn off, and what are you going to turn in? Because as they say, garbage in, garbage out. Thank you.

The Daily Stoic - The Stoic Way To Survive 2026

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