The Daily Stoic - These Are Three Ancient Stoic Secrets | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Without wisdom, the other virtues cannot truly flourish—it is wisdom that guides our courage, moderates our discipline, and directs our sense of justice. Come see Ryan Holiday LIVE in Austin, Texas on September 17! | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work📚 The Four Stoic Virtues: Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, Courage, are timeless keys to living your best life. The Daily Stoic is releasing a limited collector’s edition set of all four books signed and numbered, with a title page identifying these books as part of the only printing of this series. PLUS we're including one of the notecards Ryan used while writing the series. Pre-order the Limited Edition Stoic Virtues Series Today! | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/stoic-virtues🎙️ 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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women help you learn from them. to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visitdailystoic.com. When did they carve it? Who first uttered the words? Why did they put them there? Did Zeno see them when he visited as a young man? Did Cleanthes or Chrysippus? We don't know, but we do know that for thousands of years, three inscriptions adorned the temple of Apollo in Delphi, the mythic heart of the ancient world that was nestled high in the slopes of Mount Parnassus at the top of the sacred way were where generations of Greeks, went to get advice for their toughest problems.

The three inscriptions, know thyself. Nothing in excess and surety brings ruin. What do they mean? They mean knowing your strengths, your flaws, your patterns, impulses, fears, desires, biases, and blind spots. It means doing the right thing, in the right amount, in the right way. It means that pride goeth before the fall means always have a backup plan. If you read the Stoics with these three Delphic maxims in mind, you will see traces and echoes of them everywhere. Zeno said that nothing is more hostile to a firm grasp on knowledge than self-deception.

Epictetus said that freedom isn't secured by filling up on your heart's desire, but by removing your desire. but by removing your desire. And Seneca, the unexpected blow lands the heaviest. Indeed, the Stoics were not just intimately familiar with these maxims. It's what they were striving for, a life of self-clarity, moderation in all things, and freedom from the traps of certainty, ego, and excess. And at the core of that pursuit, the one virtue that made the rest possible, the one thing that helps us know ourselves to find the right amount and to stay open?

Wisdom. So many and so great are the powers which will be found in a man, Cicero wrote, of all which wisdom is the parent and director. It's wisdom that helps us understand who we are, what's enough, and when we are and aren't being foolish. And it's what the new book is all about. wisdom takes work the fourth in the stoic virtue series courage is calling discipline is destiny right thing right now and now wisdom takes work i'm so grateful to everyone who's read the earlier books i'm grateful

that you're listening to this right now and everyone who supported daily stoic this is the book i've been working on now it's the culmination of six years of work i feel like i've become not wise in the process, but certainly wiser. And I'm really excited to share it with you. One of the best things you can do to support an author is to pre-order their books. It's how publishers decide how many to print. It's how you get on the bestseller list. It's how bookstores decide how many to order. All that comes in from pre-ordering. So I try to make it interesting. You can even buy signed, numbered first editions of all four books in a really cool unique box set that we have. A bunch of awesome stuff like that. You can get pages for

from the original manuscripts that I worked on as I was writing and editing the book. Can they even have dinner with me here in Bastrop, Texas, and a bunch of other fellow Stoics. Lots of awesome stuff. Just go to dailystoic.com slash wisdom. Please do pre-order. It comes out in October. Really excited for you to hear and see and read the new book. And it would mean a lot if you could pre-order at dailystoic.com slash wisdom.

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Crea pure is a naturally flavored lemonade-style powder, comes in on-the-go travel packs, you mix it into water so you can take it wherever you are, which for me is on the road sometimes, taking my kids to school early, rushing out of the house to take my kids to school. the office. I forgot to do it at home. And they back it with science and transparency and trust. If you've been curious about creatine, you should check out Momentus. Just head over to livemomentus.com and use the code Stoic for up to 35% off your first order. That's code Stoic at livemometus.com. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the daily Stoic podcast. I'm in the middle of recording the audiobook for the Wisdom book right now.

I think I'm about halfway done. It is a painful experience doing audiobooks, I will say. Not just because it's exhausting. I'm sucking on a throat coat lozange right now. Like, as a writer, you just don't talk that much, right? It's not my job. I don't talk that much. Today I did a podcast episode with Stephen Greenblot, which was awesome.

Can't wait to bring you that. then I had to spend a bunch of time doing the audiobook, and then now I'm getting caught up on some podcast intro, so this is quite a lot. But anyways, finishing up the audiobook, I can't wait for you to hear it, taking my time, doing it slowly, doing it right, so it'll be a great listening experience. By the way, you can pre-order signed first editions of Wisdom Takes Work. Also, if you pre-order the audiobook, you can get bonuses too. All that's at dailystoic.com slash pre-order. But today, for our Q and A. As I said, I don't do that much talking unless I'm doing talks. Back in January, I did a virtual talk for one of the world's largest staffing agencies, company called Randstad Enterprise. And it was a sort of start of the year, strategy, kickoff, motivational thing. They had about 1,000 employees in 15 countries. And they asked me a bunch of questions. And I am really excited to bring that to you. And I can't wait to see some. more of you in person, by the way, in September, I'm going to be doing a talk here in Austin at the

Westlake Performing Arts Center. You can grab those tickets at daily stoiclid.com as well. So if you want to ask me some questions, you can do that. I'll see you there. Anyways, here's me talking to some interesting people from all over the world, answering their questions about stoicism. You talk a little bit, you talked a bit about your, you know, your pre-mortem and your journaling. I'm interested. Motivation can wane over time, particularly in the face of setbacks. And we have had a particularly tough year last year. What strategies can leaders, teams, people adopt to sustain that motivation and build momentum towards our goals?

Yeah, to me, one of the ways we sustain momentum, and I think about this on every book project because you start off with excitement and you're ready to go and then you fall into what I once heard an entrepreneur called the Trough of Despair and that's after the excitement wears off and you're just in it.

And I try to look for little bits of momentum. I try to break a big, complex, hard project into as many small ones as I can. I was saying I swam at Barton Springs this morning I try to swim a mile, but I don't swim a mile, right? The pool is an eighth of a mile long, so I swim eight laps of one eighth mile. And I'm just trying to get through this small chunk, right? This is what the idea of doing just a couple crappy pages a day is supposed to help you do as a writer also. Many, many days. I would say most days, I do more than the crappy minimum. And I would

say that they're not so crappy. But the idea is by sort of lowering the stakes or lowering what you're trying to accomplish in the day, what you're able to do is create a sort of a minimum or a beatable goal that allows you to get that sense of momentum or progress. If you're trying to turn a freighter, right, you're not going to notice much day to day. If you have to only feel progress because the freighter is visibly pointed in a different direction than it was when you started, that's going to be a lot of disappointing days. But if you can find benchmarks inside that where things to encourage you inside that, that to me is what you want to focus on. So I try to take a big project or an overwhelming thing or an exhausting thing

and break it down into smaller pieces that allow me to feel like I'm making progress and I'm checking boxes. I love that. And there's a couple of things coming through that I think build on that and relate a lot to the emotions also that you go through as a human being every day. But then you also try and bring to your work or not. bring to your work. And there's a question here around the Stoic Tenant of striving for contentment. How do you recommend balancing this contentment with this constant drive for growth? And is that

your, you know, your couple of pages a day? Is it your positive action? How would you really balance those two things? This is maybe a little controversial, but I like to tell people that I don't have goals. And I don't have goals because of something the Stoics talk about, which is that you're always wanting to be focused on what's in your control. And a lot of our goals are external, right? People are like, I want to be accepted into this university, or I want to hit this bestseller list, or I want to be the number one salesperson, right? These are things that are sometimes based on measurements, but they're largely based on criteria or gatekeepers or a selection process that isn't always fair and certainly not always up to you. So I focus instead on,

on effort, I focus on my own sort of internal metrics of like, am I giving my best? Am I growing? Am I learning? So I am always trying to get better, but I'm not so much focused on whether other people are rewarding or recognizing or appreciating that improvement. And I realize this is a little bit counterintuitive and perhaps is slightly more well suited to the world of being a writer than a business person. I just think it can be so easy to get caught up in numbers or various external metrics. And what you're neglecting is the sort of day-to-dayness of are, am I doing my best? Am I really putting myself into this? Am I really trying? Am I doing all that I can do? And if I feel that, then then I can be satisfied each and every day,

whether I get the win or not, whether I get the recognition or not. And that's just kind of one of the things I think a lot about. I'm not so much motivated by how my books are selling, but how I'm growing as a writer, how I'm becoming more balanced between work and my personal life. Am I becoming more content, as you said? That isn't to say that I'm not still trying to improve, but in my less needy is my is my ambition less external and more internal to me that's a that's a sign of progress am i am i the best at what i am capable of being that's the race that i'm running as opposed to

looking around and comparing myself to all these other people there i'll give you one sort of beautiful image that seneca has he talks about this word euthemia which to him meant sort of tranquility but I think also kind of means a contentment. And he says that the key in life is to know the path that you're on. He says to have a sense of the path that you're on and not be distracted by the paths that crisscross yours. He says, especially the paths of those who are hopelessly lost. So I'm trying to get where I'm trying to go.

That's what's motivating me. I'm not complacent in that sense. But I'm content, or at least inwardly focused, in the sense that I'm not trying to beat anyone else. And somebody else's success does not have the power to make me unhappy or discontent about my own success or my own progress. Because I understand we're running totally different races. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to The Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you.