The Daily Stoic - This Is The Part To Love | "I Spent 6 Years Researching The Most Elusive Trait In The World"

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

It seems insensitive to even suggest that someone “love” their fate. How are you supposed to love a breakup? Love that you buried someone? Love that you lost your business?🎥 Watch this episode on The Daily Stoic YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fLpCRbQUs8📖 Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday is out NOW! Grab a copy here: https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work👉 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/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.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. crazy. It seems insensitive to even suggest that someone loved their fate. How are you supposed to love a breakup? Love that you buried someone. Love that you lost your business. Love that you got robbed.

Love that accident. Love political dysfunction or even persecution. Well, we can clear that up right now. The Stoics didn't love the fire that swept through Rome. They didn't love the betrayals and the backstabbing. They did not love funerals or cancer or losing an election. They did not love the plague. That's silly. No, what they loved was what this demanded of them. They loved the opportunity for virtue and erraty that disasters and troubles and setbacks and loss presents us. The part they embraced was not the loss. The part they embraced was what it gave them. A chance to be there for others. A chance to grow. A chance to throw themselves into rebuilding. A chance to start over. A chance to be courageous and decent and kind. That is the part we love. We love that it gives us more of

ourselves, that this experience, however unfair, however painful, however avoidable it is, can unlock something within us. That if we do our work, if we hold true, we can emerge better than before, that we can make things better for others. We didn't ask for this, but here it is, a challenge we must rise to. And if there's anything a stoic loves, it's that. a challenge. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I've talked here before. We've made whole videos about it.

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If you're hiring, do it the right way with Indeed. Every day for the last six years, I have been working on a series of books about the cardinal virtues, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. I'm Ryan Holliday, bestselling author of The Obstacles the Way, the Daily Stoic, and now this Stoic Virtue series, Courage, calling. Discipline is destiny. Right thing right now. Finally, wisdom takes work. Writing a book is not something that happens overnight. It's not something you do in one pass. Doing a book takes work. It takes consistency. It takes discipline. In this video,

you'll see everything that went into writing my last book. Wisdom takes work. Let's dive it. They would call this a sanitarium or rest cure. But I'm working on some shit on myself in Arizona. And I had a little time. And so I am going over the first batch of note cards. I've been accumulating the note cards from the Wisdom book since 2019. Some of them are just plain. Some of them are on the note cards I've printed up later.

I'm just going through them and marking vaguely where they'll go in the book. Normally this is a process I start in the office on the big table in my office, but I'm going to do it now here. I just thought I had a little dead time, light time, dead time. I'm in a good headspace. I wanted to make what progress I did. So like these two cards will go in the intro, I think. This is another intro card. So I'm just writing intro at the top.

So sometimes I'm writing three for part three, sometimes two or three. These will go into piles and in the different segments later on. stack of note cards this is week two of laying the book out I am already running out of space from the table but hopefully these will start to come together a little bit more maybe I'll have to start using other services great so basically what I have here are all the un categorized stuff that I think pertained to part two so basically this is a think about this in three months file this This is the intro, so this is very relevant, that's looming.

These are all categorized stuff, so I don't know where it's going to go in the book, but I, a theme is emerging, and then this is part three, so God knows when I'll think about this, but I'm going to put these away because I'm already running out of space on the table. So I was down here in Florida in August of 22, working on part one, the early stages, part one, of the justice book, which I wasn't sure if it was going to come together or not. I wasn't sure how it was going to go. The book was still, you know, in pieces, the instruction manual not clear. I wasn't sure how the book was going to work. So here I am now in March of 24 and I'm in the exact same spot on the Wisdom book. I was here for a week. I wrote maybe two and a half

chapters or I got the starts of two and a half solid chapters. And so I'm just trying to remind myself like it'll come together because the funny thing is I was also even though it was spring break for my kids I also had to sign 2,000 of the 15,000 tip-ins that I'm doing for the justice book and so the idea is I've got the final bit of the justice book in my hands as I am in the same place literally and figuratively as it was on the last book and that's sort of the process that you remind yourself of you remind yourself it's a process it comes together you do the work you don't think about the outcomes you just keep your head down keep chipping away at it and it starts to come together

working on the book and this crazy thing happened yesterday like the first i think i'm on chapter four chapter five they're all male examples like just it's smidged many male examples and i thought be awesome if the next chapter that i wrote was built around a female example that's just vaguely what i was thinking and so i decided to work on the common place book chapter. I've showed you like how I, all my, all my books are from note cards, right? And so I pull out this note card and it says, Joan Didian did note cards. There's a mention of it in this book. I pull it up, sends me down a rabbit hole. I had totally forgotten that in slides him towards Bethlehem, Joan Didian writes an essay called on keeping a notebook. Basically

everything that I want to build the chapter around is in this really awesome essay. which she wrote in the 60th. That's what I was working on yesterday. That's what I'm working on today. But the irony, the part that made it just feel so magical and cool, because I don't know if you can hear this is speaking chairman. This is Joan Didion's chair. And I never met Joan Didion.

I came to her writing a little bit late. Maybe she would hate what I do, but I think it's pretty fucking cool that I am sitting in the chair, one of the greatest writers of all time, and writing about her in one of my books. So anyway, there's that. What changes when you hit number one on the Neurotimes with our list?

Literally nothing. Back to work this morning. I am going through John Stuart Mills' autobiography, which, according to this note, I first read in November of 2010. That's pretty cool. I'm doing a chapter on John Stuart Mill's Nervous Breakdown, brought on by studying and thinking too much, and presenting it as kind of a cautionary take. kind of a cautionary tale. So that's the project now. It is Thursday, June 20th.

I still had to drive my kids to school. Still I had to feed the animals last night. Still, regular fucking person, nothing changes. You just do what you got to do. You get back at it. Usually as a writer, I'm not a big believer on changing locations. I think you should be able to do your work where you are. The idea of traveling, going somewhere else, and finding a good spot to write doesn't tend to work out. But last summer, I did a chunk on the Justice Book in LA. This summer, I did a chunk on the Lincoln chapter here in Australia.

And it's worked out okay. As well as I wanted, but I got some stuff done. It is 7 p.m. on August 6th, I guess, in Australia. I'm going home tomorrow early in the morning. This is the second place we stayed. This is in Bondi. I got a decent amount done on the Lincoln chapter, not as much as I wanted. I had this fantasy that I would come back with, like, the whole chapter done.

And it doesn't always go that way. some progress on some other stuff and I have an idea, but I forgot my journals. So I was using this little kid's notebook I got in a museum. I think what I'm going to have to do when I get back, I bought two extra books about Lincoln and I'm just going to have to do more reading. I need more material. And then what I'm going to do, and I did the same thing on the justice book and on the discipline book. Sometimes you stop making forward momentum. And my advice, when you stop making forward momentum on a project, is to go where you will have forward momentum. Go towards something that you have wrapped your head around. So actually, I had some ideas for the next chapters I'm

going to do in the book. So I'm going to put this link and thing on pause while I do some more reading and just go back and focus on that and see if I can't get a better sense of what I need that chapter to do and then come back and back fill it. Just what I've written and the material I put down alone is 7,500 words. So almost certainly everything I need is there. It's just how to connect it all together and the point I want to make is not there. All in all, though, very, very successful trip. It's funny, as I was doing it on stage, I talked in the talks that I did at Sydney Town Hall and Melbourne Town Hall, I started a tour of all the books. And I talked about the fourth book and I said, I wish I could give you a good definition of the fourth virtue,

the virtue of wisdom, but I can't because I'm currently writing about it. No, by that I mean I'm still figuring it out. And then I said, but maybe that's the point. You're supposed to be working on it. You're never supposed to actually arrive. As it happened, like literally live on stage. I flipped open meditations and I started to read some things that marks really said he learned from Antoninus. And it gave me a sense of what I want to say in the chapter. So who else? We'll see. I've got this manuscript to read on the plane to finish. I did about half of it on the way here and we'll go from there. It is 5 a.m. on August 8th. I gained a day coming back. None of us slept. The kids woke up at 2 in the morning. I'm back in the office and I'm

going to work on first chapter part three it is Christmas Eve I spend the morning with the family and now I am doing a little bit of editing when I turn this in at the beginning of November it was 99,000 words I just got edits back from Julia who did a nice pass on it and I'm down to 81,225 I think I can get another 2,000 words out and then I may call it I don't know listening to the gang of youths it's a good day this is my Christmas present to myself I just fucking love doing this I did about an hour on the manuscript today maybe a little more I might come back to it later but I'm now 80,715 words

so I'm chipping away at it this is the work I spent about a month doing this in L.A. in July of 23, and I took the Justice book down about 10,000 words. And I think it was better for it. That's what you have to tell yourself. It's painful, but ultimately you're better for it. It's a Saturday morning. I'm down here in Florida. It's raining, so we didn't get to do our normal walk this morning.

But I sat down to work on the manuscript. My wife went out with the kids for coffee. for coffee and it's going to be a big moment. So the book is currently 80,479 words. I took a while. I knew for a while I was going to have to cut this, but now I am going to cut it. And I'm going to cut this chapter in part three that, here this is what the editor said. This chapter is pretty much just summarizing what the book is about. And so to keep it doesn't really make sense. It's not adding anything new. There's a little piece I'm going to move probably to the afterward. But anyways, all right, let's do it.

So 80,479 words, let's hit delete here. 79,684 words. We did it. There's probably a little bit more, but we are now officially under where we want to be. All right, it is 312 p.m. on the 31st, and the manuscript is going in. In.

It's now February 17th and I got an email which I was both looking forward to and dreading this weekend, which is from my publisher. The copy edits back on the Wisdom book, which I now have to go back through and do Not just those edits, but I have this many note cards that I have to add into the book, which is going to require some cutting to make room for. So I have a bunch of work to do before this thing goes back. The publisher took six weeks to do the copy edits, and then I have like three weeks to get them back. So I may have to ask for more time, but that is the next step in the process.

One of the more excruciating ones. So it's just going to be notes on notes. See all these notes? So already a dispute with the copy editor. I have this quote, Of all the virtues, wisdom is the most elusive. But it's something to which you aspire, something that you attempt to one day acquire.

I say, yet we approach that we will almost certainly never get there and that at best true wisdom is something we can only approach. Despite a lifetime of work, it exceeds our grasp each time, slipping with each step further into the distance like the horizon that can never be reached. And he said, don't you mean escapes? The cliche is about a person's reach exceeding their grasp, not the goal exceeding their grasp. No, I'm referencing this exact quote from Robert Browning. Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp. What is heaven for? So, no, you're wrong. We don't know what you're talking about. But this is what copy editing is like one time out of 10,

they're correct. And then all the other times you're just like rolling your eyes at it. All right, here it is. A manuscript for the new book game. Well, this is the first past pages. This is six years in the making, the final book in the series. Oh, Tommy, do you want to see? You want to check it out? Yeah, it's not that pop.

The secret to finishing big projects is to do them a little bit at a time. I have thousands of these kippins, that's the first page in the new book with Tim Tate's work to sign. And how am I doing all of these tens of thousands of pages? of pages a little bit at a time. That's what a live time, dead time is about too. I'm waiting for my food in a restaurant. So I'm signing a couple of these pages. Sit here. And then these get bound up, put in the book. I can't have given a talk about courage, to talk about discipline, and to talk about justice, and then talk to these future commanders of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers and fighter jets about the idea of wisdom and not address the fact that you're

removing books from a fucking library a few yards from here. my notes in the margins. I'm going to record the audiobook office tomorrow. Well, that is it. I've been at this audiobook for almost a month. I did it in smaller chunks this time so I could keep the energy up and my interest up. I finally did it. This is, I think, the fourth audiobook that I've recorded here in my studio next to the painted porch.

porch and wisdom takes work is now in the can it will go to editing and then it will be out on october 21st as i'm doing the audiobook i am still making changes at this very late phase which i'm sure my publisher is going to be pleased about wisdom the final virtue what the final book in this series is about is an elusive virtue all right it is finally finally here six years I have been working on this series actually since I was on a hike in Bastrop State Park and I had the idea and then I did courage and discipline justice and now the first time I'm holding in my hands wisdom this is the fourth and final book in the stoic virtue series and this is literally the first time I have gotten to hold it

and I'm very excited. I just got back from a very wet, very stormy, pre-dawn run for a very full day of press. For the book, I did 6.2 miles. My phone was going off in the middle of it. There was like a pre-evacuation alert for mudslides and flooding. You know, it was very wet, but also enormous palm fronds were falling all around me as I was running. So was this wise? No, it was not wise. It was the opposite of wisdom. But before a very full day of press, you got to do whatever it takes to get regularly. so that's what I was doing.

And a little bit of crazy is a good thing. All of this is a little bit crazy. So, you know, balance it out. My next guest, my dear friend Ryan Holiday, argues that one way to deal with these changes is to cultivate wisdom. In his new book, Wisdom takes work. Wisdom takes work. Wisdom takes work.

Wisdom takes work. I'm heading to the Daily Show now. It is 5.09 p.m. It should be fun. I did the Daily Show once, maybe three years ago. Hopefully it goes well. Welcome back to the other show. My guest tonight is the creator of Daily Stoic

and a best-selling author whose latest book is called Wisdom Takes Work, Learn, Apply, Repeat. Please welcome Ryan Holliday. I think it's hard to subtract justice from any of the other virtues. And at the same time, wisdom is the most essential

in that it tells us what is or isn't just, how to bring that justice into the world, what to be courageous about what is the moderate the temperate or the disciplined amount of something what's too much what's too little the new book wisdom takes work is now out wherever you buy books this is the fourth and final book in the stoic virtue series if you want me to sign it you can head over to daily stoic.com slash wisdom to grab it look ads are annoying they are to be avoided if at all possible i understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again,

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