The Daily Stoic - We Can Be Hurt…Or We Can Do This Instead | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

People will betray us in life. They will take from us. We can be hurt and broken and angry about this, or we can use it as Epictetus did—as a reminder of the transient nature of possession. 💡 We designed our How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) as a personal field guide —part book club, part masterclass, part daily practice. It’s designed to help you not just read the words of Epictetus, but live them—to turn his timeless wisdom into real change in your own life and the lives of those around you.And if you get the guide before July 26th, you’ll receive a private invitation to an exclusive LIVE Q&A with Ryan Holiday, where he’ll go deep on all things Epictetus, Stoicism, and how to apply these ideas right now, in today’s world. Head to dailystoic.com/epictetuscourse to learn more and get your book, guide, and bundle today!👉 Get How To Read Epictetus (A Daily Stoic Guide) & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ 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 to 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, visit DailyStstoic.com. One evening Epictetus woke up to hear someone in his house. Walking towards the noise he found a criminal had stolen the iron lamp he kept burning in

a shrine in his front hallway. As always, Epictetus handled the situation with calmness and humor. Tomorrow, he said to himself, you will find an earthenware lamp, for a man can only lose what he has. But what if Epictetus had been awake when the man walked in? What if he'd caught the thief red-handed? Would he have beaten the criminal up? Would he have fought for his prized lamp, pressed charges after, demanded restitution? Actually, if we know anything about Epictetus,

we can say confidently that the situation would have gone almost exactly as it did. To him, the theft was a reminder from fate that we don't truly possess anything. It was also a reminder we can guess that human beings, out of desperation or greed, do unvirtuous things. That is something we don't control, but we do control how we respond. We can imagine that Epictetus had caught the thief and gotten to talk to the man, as the bishop did so beautifully in Les Mis when he catches the thief and he says, take this stolen silver and use it to become an honest man. People will betray us in life. They will take from us. We can be hurt and angry and broken about it,

or we can use it as Epictetus did as a reminder of the transient nature of possession. We can use it as an opportunity as they did in that famous play to be merciful, to let them think better of it, to forgive as Marcus tried to do when he was betrayed by Avidius Cassius. We can get better, and we can try to make them better too. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. A couple of weeks ago, I was recording from a balcony in Athens last week.

I believe I was recording from a balcony in Ithaca. I am here in Vaffy, I guess. I don't know how you would pronounce it, but we spent the last four or five days putzing around Ithaca, swimming every morning, trying to do a little writing on the new book, enjoying time with family. And as I was saying last time, I was in this region, in this neck of the woods back in February when I was talking to a marketing and a VC company in Abu Dhabi.

I was telling them about this guy named Zeno who suffered a shipwreck in the Mediterranean in the fourth century BC. And it's funny, we were walking along the port here in Bathy and there is this sunken sailboat. And so I told my kids the same story that I was telling the folks in Abu Dhabi about how Zeno suffers a shipwreck.

And instead of it being the worst thing that ever happened to him, he says, he makes a great fortune when he suffers a shipwreck because it drives him thus to philosophy. And I was trying to say, hey, when we were in the Athenian Agora last week, we walked by that place, that big pit in the ground, that's the Painted Porch, that's the Stoa by that place, that big pit in the ground.

That's the Painted Porch, that's the Stoa Pukkili, that's where it all happened. So I've been circling around this for a while and I've used this little vacation as an excuse to sort of get a little bit closer to it. Anyways, here are some questions that the folks asked me back when I was in Abu Dhabi. I thought they were really interesting.

I always love trying to take what I do and translate it, not from one language to another, but from one sort of culture to another, one line of work to another. I think it landed. I think their questions were really interesting and wanted to share that with you now. So enjoy. Agent Nate Russo returns in Oracle 3, Murder at the Grandview, the latest installment of the gripping Audible original series. When a reunion at an abandoned island hotel turns deadly, Russo must untangle accident from murder. But beware, something sinister lurks in the Grandview's shadows.

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This is important for people who are in the leadership. I think that's a great question. When you feel strongly about something, when you feel like that energy or whatever, you're attracted to something, you're mad about something, you're worried about something, you're driven to do something, stepping back and going, hey, why do I want this? Is it ego or is it something else? I'll give you an example. I'm finishing my next book right now. It's the fourth book in this series on the final virtues. And I just got back all the edits from my editor. Now my immediate reaction is like, how dare you? This thing was perfect when I gave it to you and now you're you know, you're giving me all these notes and

That's the ego reaction right the like I'm proud of this thing I put a lot of myself in it and now it's coming back Not just with lots of notes that are critical But also like I do all this work if my ego tells me it's perfect then I don't have to do all this work right humility says I'll make there's something to it and Now to do that work or confidence says I'm jumping to better place to come around confidence says Some of these notes are right and I'm gonna use them and get better and then sometimes the notes are wrong and I'm okay sometimes the notes are wrong and I'm okay defending that and pushing back, right? So what I do is I get the notes back and I'm frustrated by them for a little bit and then

instead of responding, I sit on it and then I go, you know what, I'm just going to start with the obvious notes. Like I'm going to start with the ones that are small, where they're fixing typos or little things. And I'm going to work myself up to the harder ones that are more vexing to deal with. So I just try to go, hey, why is this important to me? Why am I getting worked up about this? What matters? Is this my ego or is this actually a basic boundary issue?

I think one of the other ways we can help with this is with something that you go doesn't often do is just ask someone else, like ask someone who's not as caught up in it. I get asked to do something and I usually get off the phone, I have to think about it. And then I call my wife and I say, I ask, Hey, should I do this? Here's why I'm thinking about not doing it. Here's what bothers me about I'm trying to get the perspective of somebody, somebody who's identity is not tied up in it. I think that's another really important one. So I would say time and then how do we alter our perspective so we can see it from a different angle. Those are

two of the best ways. Is the solution this happiness? I would say that again the idea of the points between two vices, if we have ego on one end and then we have sort of worthlessness or a lack of sort of spine or just utter lowliness, right? Kind of in the middle, I would say, is competence. And to me, competence is an awareness of our strengths and our assets paired with an understanding of our vulnerabilities and our assets paired with an understanding of our vulnerabilities and our weaknesses and if you have both then you're going to be great and if you only have one you're

going to get yourself into trouble I think. My question is around stillness. So in the world we are living in right so the world rewards speed and productivity, right, all the time. And what do you recommend for leaders to make space for, you know, stillness? Yeah. And still the attitude. Yeah, of course. Yeah, obviously, communication is important. Speed is important. But at the same time, if you're always just reacting and reacting, I think you're going to get yourself in trouble. And then if you're also just, you know, saying everything that pops into your head,

you're going to get yourself into trouble. So again, I think all these things come down to the, the stoke virtue of temperance or balance or moderation somewhere in the middle. What I try to do is I try to create distance between me and say social media. Like I understand this is where I interact with my fans, so I communicate with things,

but I also, I try not to carry it around in my pocket. You know, where if I have one moment of quiet, I'm immediately seeking out noise, right? So I don't have any of them on my phone. I have someone on my team who handles them, but I, and so I have to be more thoughtful about what I want to do. I'm trying to think more, like, thinking about

how long this thing is gonna last, thinking about the things that are gonna go I'm trying to think more like thinking about how long this thing is going to last, thinking about the things that are going to go the distance I think is really important. One of the addictions of Amazon for many years was this idea of focus on the things that don't change. And I think a lot of the reason we're busy and noisy and you know don't have that stillness is we're focused on like the trends of the moment, the scandal of the moment, you know, the joke of the moment, the meme of the moment, and how many of those are still gonna be relevant a month from now, let alone a year or 10 years from now.

And so, like, one of the things I think leaders need, I would say leaders should consume less news and read more books. Obviously, I'm a little biased as an author, but I think you want to be consuming information and learning things that were designed to stay relevant for a long period of time. And I mean, look, is that we're talking about today, 25 centuries old, and they're just as timely as ever. How much is the latest study or the latest news story, the latest business trend? What are the chances that people are going to be talking about it

25 weeks from now, let alone 25 centuries from now? So I would try to, I think the more you're rooting yourself in the timeless things, you can find what's timely in them. Like when I read history, it helps me understand what's happening right now, but I have less opinions about it. I'm less judgmental about it. I'm less threatened by it because it's less up to me. It already has.

And so I think leaders need to sort of cultivate time and space for that kind of stuff. We want to be focused more on the things that are evergreen, that are perennial, to best principles that bedrock stuff and less about, you know, the latest thing. You mentioned you have the student agency. What is one thing that you want to make sure they block? That's a great question. Obviously, your kids need to know that you love them, that you support them, that they make your life better by being in it, and all this sort of basic parenting stuff. But one of the things my wife and I are thinking about, which I think is kind of the metasphere

of life, is how do you deal with frustrations? Right, like, because life is frustrating and certainly it is full of frustrating situations. How good are you at responding to that? Like how, when you are dysregulated, how can you regulate yourself? Have the awareness to go, hey, I'm feeling this way, or I don't like this,, I am feeling this way,

or I don't like this, or I wish it was otherwise. And then deal with it instead of hitting it personally, instead of giving up, instead of lashing out, to be like, okay, this happened. I don't control that that happened. I do control what I do next. And to me that at the most basic level is not just a skill you need to succeed, but

you see how hard life is for people who do not have that skill. And I think like languages, you know, it's easier to learn when you're young. The more you can, you can figure out how to deal with uncomfortable, difficult situations that are going to life. In America, we have this expression called snowplow parents, maybe less snow here, so you guys don't use that as much. But a snowplow parent is a parent who goes in front of their kids

and just constantly clearing everything out of the way. And that's nice, but you're depriving them of the ability to know what to do when stuff is in their way, because they just don't, they haven't experienced that. And so how do we deal with emotions, struggles, adversity, difficulty? I think at the core, that's what stoicism is, is a set of principles and strategies for dealing with the fact that whether you're a slave like Epictetus or you're the emperor

like Marcus Aurelius, there are more things out of your control than in your control. And the ability to separate those two things into the proper categories and then to focus all your energy on the parts that are in your control, that's the whole game. 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

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.