The Daily Stoic - This is the Main Thing | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

The Stoics appreciated success, but it wasn’t something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn’t how they defined themselves.Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🇺🇸 USA dates:Portland, Oregon - June 8 San Francisco, California - June 11Minneapolis, Minnesota - August 18 Chicago, Illinois - August 19 Detroit, Michigan - August 20 🇳🇿 NEW ZEALAND:Auckland, New Zealand - October 13 🇦🇺 AUSTRALIA dates:Sydney, Australia - October 16 Melbourne, Australia - October 18 Brisbane, Australia - October 20Perth, Australia - October 21 🎥 VIDEO EPISODES | Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailSee 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, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is the main thing. There's nothing wrong with success. There's nothing wrong with power. There's nothing wrong with living a nice life with achievement or admiration. Certainly many Stoics did precisely that. Seneca, Cato, Marcus Aurellus, they were important and well known.

They were admired. They were influential. But you know what? They would have shrugged all that off. They appreciated the success, but it wasn't something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn't how they defined themselves. The main thing, Walter Wade, says in Walker Percy's Stoicism-inspired novel, The Moviegoer, the main thing, Banks, is to be humble, to make golden fleece and be humble about it.

It might have meant a lot to others, you were saying. but it didn't mean anything to him. That's how we might assume that Marcus Aurelius felt about a lot of what was thrown at him. In fact, one of the lines in meditations suggests as much, where he says that he measures himself not by how many honors he's received, but how many he's turned down. He didn't make golden fleece, but he did remind himself that the purple cloak of the emperor was nothing more

than an ordinary one died by shellfish blood. Clearly, he still tried to do things. Clearly, he was still active in the world. he just measured himself by his humility, by his indifference more than he did, by his achievement or status. And so must we. We can still try to climb the ladder of success. We can be powerful. We can live a nice life.

The main thing, though, is to do this and be humble even so. Humble even if you have achieved an impressive amount, even if you have done many impressive things. These AI tools are super powerful. be super helpful. But like anything online, you've got to be worried about privacy. And if you've ever hesitated about typing something into an AI chat, which I have, well, you're not alone. That hesitation is exactly why duck.com built duck.AI. You go to duck. com. A.I. And you can chat privately with the same AI as you're already using, chat chitia, your clod, and your data stays yours, not theirs. It's a win-win. Plus, it's from duck. Go,

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I took my kids to school, went for a nice run around Town Lake, took a shower, went to the airport, flew to Las Vegas, drove about 45 minutes outside of Las Vegas, gave a talk at a hotel at, I don't know, 7 o'clock, finished at 8, went straight to the hotel room, changed into some slightly more comfortable clothes, and then I drove. I drove from Vegas to Phoenix. They told me it would be like four hours. It was like five hours, and there's also a time change in there. So I got in at like two in the morning. I crashed, and then I had to get up at, I don't know, 7 a.m. I gave a talk to the Chicago Cubs. Then I talked to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Then I had a talk to you guys to Daily Stoic fans at a theater in Phoenix. Actually, my parents came. Then we had dinner after I crashed, woke up at like 5 a.m. Flew home in time to take my kids to see a Harry Potter live orchestra thing. that was more than 36 hours, I think. I don't know, I can't keep track. I couldn't keep track of it at the time. It was crazy, but it was lovely.

I got to do basically four talks in 24 hours. I got to see a bunch of you. And it was also prep for a busy summer and fall that I have coming up. I'm going to be in Portland and San Francisco in June, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit in August. And then in October, I'm going to be all over Australia and New Zealand. You can come see me. daily stoiclive.com. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of the Q&A that the people in Phoenix asked me. I think you'll like that. And hopefully it's a nice little preview of a conversation

we might be able to have there in Australia or California or Oregon or Illinois or Minnesota or Michigan. Wherever you want to come see me, I will see you there soon. All right. Let's get into it. confront something like grief, like this very big, all-consuming. It doesn't ask them comes back. Yeah. Well, it sounds like you're going through something, too. It sounds like our first question, so I'm sorry. I think what we can say they would not do is shrug it off or say that it's nothing,

and you would never feel it. That's, again, the stereotype of this dope. So we know this because, and I think it's all just pointing to this is it's better than any answer I can give you. Senator writes three incredibly moving essays on grief. They're actually called his consolation series.

One of them is consolation to his mother after he's been exiled and she's devastated. And he's writing to both reassure her, but you can tell he's really trying to reassure himself. He writes to the daughter of a friend of his who is grieving

her father, who's devastated by grief. And I'm forgetting who the other one is four, but Seneca, the Stoicester, the philosopher is supposed to not be affected by things or ravished by emotions or whatever, three of his best writings are only about dealing with this fundamentally devastating and overwhelming thing. He's saying, you know, you don't shrug it off. There are ways to think about it. There's ways to process it. There's ways to deal with it, but it's also a part of life. It's the one thing we all have in common because we all have that other thing in common, but just that we're just overwhelming. world. Hey Ryan. Yes. So I've seen your crazy stack of lincoln books and just trying to figure out,

are there any helpful hints for how to read more, how to read lots? Yeah. Yeah. Do you speed read? How do you do it all? Okay, so it's important that everyone realize that speed reading is a scam. There's almost nobody who reads a lot. people who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading and and they spend a lot of time reading because reading is hard and and to do it well and to spend time on but also people who like reading like spending time reading and so why would I try to rush through it as fast as possible name another pleasure that you try to get over as quickly as possible so so I spend a lot of time reading that I think that I

think about it as my job right and it is My job is I own a book store and I write books. But I spend a lot of time reading because it makes my life better and it's one of the highest ROI activities that I have and by ROI in professional and personal makes me better as a human being makes me better at my job and also is enjoyable and lovely and makes me happy. So I spend a lot of time doing it. Should you spend as many hours as I have spent reading books about Libyan? Probably not.

I can give you one or two and save the truth. in trouble, but that's what I love doing. Nothing gets me more excited than finding out there's like a thousand big you look about something I'm really interested in. It's written by someone who's an amazing writer, so that's what I love

doing. But yeah, you spend a lot time doing it, and I will say, though, that the more time who's been reading particularly about a singular subject, that is the only way I have found to read fast. If you want to read faster, know a lot about the topic you're reading about,

That is one way to read faster because you, you're not like, wait, what is that? And that's not stopping to look things up, and you're not being in due. You understand where this is going and you can speed up a little bit. But other, there's really no way to read faster other than by doing the work of having read a lot about this subject. And it's good work and it's worth it. So you mentioned earlier with the question about how to actually get discipline that you want to start small. Something that really helped me was to just think about the next five seconds and think. Okay, in five seconds,

what would I be really happy about if I did it right now? Oftentimes just like get up, take a deep breath, fix your posture, something like that, and that starts to change in the next things to do. That really ties into how like you said, like there's always more before you count them, but in the face of like uncertainty about uncertainty, where you're not really sure how to do the counting,

what kinds of things would still say about how to get started doing that, when it's not even clear how to plan, and the tools that you have to plan aren't really, there's no clear precedent on what to do. So you're saying, what do you do when you don't know what to do? Is that a question? How do we try to make a plan to do what we don't know what to do when we don't know how to make that plan in the first place?

I have a magic trick for you. Take a lot of walks. Maybe the single best thing we could possibly do to think better, to think more clearly, to get that sort of philosophical view, that perspective. I try to take a walk every single day. We found this dog on the side of our roads and dumped it and my kids assured me that it would do the walking and

I've got a belt for that lie. But like I take the dog for a walk but really the dog is taking me for a walk and really the dog is allowing you to do my thinking, right, to get that perspective. To review the day or to prepare for the day, I think human beings were designed to think all the move, right? where the oldest evidences that we have a human meeting on this continent are our footsteps in white state's national park of somebody traveling as their their young child is probably a woman

caring a kid and that that walk they're on their their path is crisscross by like giant sloth tracks and all these species that don't exist anymore like that's what we were evolved to do to travel long distances and i think that's there's something about walking it kind of jodging like so to me my heart philosophical and dedicated practice is inseparable from my walking practice and when I'm jammed up writing or frustrating or pissed off I take a walker usually usually makes whatever that next small thing a little bit clearer it's a well-known back in my house that no one's allowed to talk to me after I get back from a letter or walk the first couple minutes is there's stuff I got right down I don't lose it don't say

I just want to say this is my introduction to Stoicism so I want to say thank you yeah welcome yeah I enjoyed it very much thank you Rube what I picked up from there's a lot information where what I picked up and the biggest lesson kind of what I learned is focus on what you can control and act on it and correct me if I'm wrong and that yeah but the first thing I kind of thought of when I was thinking of that is where is the line drawn between what you can and what you can really control because if we started to overthink it, which I definitely was, when I see the line seemed like a little blurt.

So I was just wondering. I wish there was a hairy clearer line between what was in our control and what is it. I mean, there's some stuff that's obviously not in our control, the weather or, you know, with or all of you know, things like that. But there is a middle ground that stoic writers that talk about now in a very long time.

There's that middle gray area of stuff we have some influence over. And if you are super literal about what's in control and what's not in your control, you can sort of neglect things that hangs. There's a probability of do it if you do X, Y, and Z it could have this impact. So there is some gray area there. I wish there was a, you know, a clear bug difference. This side and this side. It's more palpitantly than you not. But I think first and foremost, we have to sort of stipulate that there's a bunch of stuff that's outside of control, we spend a lot of time and energy upset about those things, trying to change those things, blaming people for those things, wishing those things or otherwise,

and that's all energy that could be spent on the other stuff. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoag 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 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.