The Daily Stoic - Who Would Ever Want to Be King? | Stop Letting Yourself Off the Hook

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

Power doesn’t wait for the perfect person to raise their hand. Someone will wield it. Someone always does.📚 Looking for stories to teach your kids about Stoicism? Check out Ryan Holiday���s books: The Boy Who Would Be King and  The Girl Who Would Be Free: A Fable About Epictetus👉 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/🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ 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, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Who would ever want to be king? It seems like it would be exciting and glamorous and intoxicating. But, you know, Marcus Aurelius did not want to be king. He dreaded it. I fictionalized this story slightly in the fable that I wrote, which is, I think, great for kids, the boy who would be king.

but it's true. Marcus Aurelius supposedly wept when he found out he would be emperor because he knew how many bad kings there had been in history and also more sweetly because he was just a boy, he did not want to move out of his mother's house. And it's perfectly reasonable that Marcus Aurelius doubted whether he could do so difficult a job, doubted whether he could make it through with his virtue and his values intact. In fact, that's probably why he did make for a good emperor because he was worried about these things. It's rational to be wary of power. It's also rational to be wary of people who are not.

It's reasonable to want to live a quieter life. It's a sign of character not to be tantalized by the trappings of fame or wealth. But power doesn't wait for the perfect person to raise their hand. Someone will wield it. Someone always does. So while it's admirable not to lust for the spotlight, the harder challenge comes when responsibility comes

looking for you, to accept it like Marcus did, and to worry about keeping your values and virtue intact, and then to actually fight to be the person that philosophy wants you to be, as he did, to be the leader who doesn't want to be king, but who is willing to serve when duty calls. And that's the idea in the boy who would be king, which I think is celebrating its sixth anniversary now. I wrote it to my kids during the pandemic, and now they're reading it to me. Someone just asked, me to sign their copy when I was doing a talk in San Diego. It was really cool. If you want to teach your kids some Stoke Philosophy, you want to introduce them to these ideas, I think this fable is great. You can get a signed copy of it and the other kids book I wrote, the boy who would

be king, the girl who would be free. You can grab those now. I'll link to them in today's show notes. We are just getting back from a trip, so the fridge is empty and we were like, oh man, we got to go the store. We're going to have for dinner tonight. And then I realized, no, no, no, wait, Hello Fresh just came. So we took the Hello Fresh meals out and we got. to work. We love Hello Fresh in our household because the meals are simple. You can make them on a busy work night. You can do it on the weekend. You can do it when you get to the end of your groceries. They have more than 100 recipes every week, which is especially great if people at your home have allergies or preferences or they don't like to eat the same thing twice. You can always make just

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dot go, where AI is always optional and private. Justice is not politics or what's happening in the law or what's happening in a courtroom or with judges and juries. It starts with like some basic human stuff first, right? It's ethics, it's values, it's honesty and loyalty and fairness and decency and kindness and transparency and integrity, right? It's these bedrock values that you either ascribe to or you don't. They're not the law. You don't have to, but they're good if you do. They make you a better person.

They make for a better world. And they're primarily in our control, right? We can lament what's happening in the world. But these values living by them, modeling them, showing that we mean what we say about them, to our employees, to our children, to our neighbors, to ourselves. That's what we're talking about. And I would say that in a disorienting, disconcerting world,

these basic values and virtues are really edifying. I think by integrity and justice and ethics and values, one of the things we're also talking about here is accountability. This is where discipline comes in, too, right? Responsibility. Do you guys know who Frank Robinson is, one of the greatest baseball players of all time, the first one to win the MVP in the American and the National League?

And then he also has a World Series MVP too. There's a story about just an ordinary game. The Orioles are playing, the Red Sox. And he hits what he thinks is a clean home run. It's going out into left field and then at the last minute it bangs off the green monster like 40 feet up almost. And as it bangs off the tin, it's at that moment that he realizes, well, he didn't hit a home run. And that he hadn't been running as fast as he should have been because he was so convinced it was going out of the park. And Robinson ends up having to settle for a double instead of what could have been a triple or maybe even a full trip around the basis if he'd really, really, really,

run. Now, the Orioles end up winning this game in a blowout. You know, it's one of his at-bats in thousands of games. His commitment, his dedication, his discipline, his contributions, they are unquestioned. So that's why the manager of the Orioles was stunned when after the game Robinson walks into his office and slams $200 down on his desk. He says, coach, I'm finding myself. He says, I should have run it out. Basically, he knew that he cheated the game. He cheated himself. He cheated his teammates by just not doing his best. Now, it didn't matter in the big scheme of things, but it mattered to him. That's what we're talking about when we're talking about virtue and discipline.

It doesn't matter that you can get away with it. It doesn't matter that no one's putting a gun to your head. It doesn't matter that most of the other times you did do the right thing. It matters this time, and that's why you have to hold yourself accountable. In that same Vietnamese prison camp as Admiral Stockdale, a young John McCain was asked to sign a confession or to give up some information. And he refused. And they said, why? No one will know.

And he responded, but I would know. I would know. That's what justice and accountability are. This is the standard. This is who I am. This is what I know I'm supposed to do. And I'm going to do it even if no one's looking. When I think about the things that I'm most embarrassed about, most ashamed about, they're not things that were public that I got in trouble for.

Most of the time, there are things where I just knew I could have done better. I knew I should have done more, and I didn't. And again, no one held me accountable, and I didn't hold myself accountable, but I'm doing it after, right? I'm looking back and going, hey, that excuse didn't age well. I should have been more involved. I should have spoken up. I should have said no to this or that. And that weighs on you, right? That's what your conscience is there for.

I think this is what Epictetus meant when he said, when anyone criticizes you, you should say to yourself, I got off easy, because if they really knew me, they'd say something worse. Accountability is primarily self-accountability. Just as discipline, as a virtue, is self-discipline. It's not that they made you do it, that you have to, that you did or didn't do it because you were afraid of getting caught or you knew you wouldn't get caught. you did or you didn't do it because of your values. Admiral James Stockdale would talk about how too many people take this idea of integrity. He said they put it in a desk drawer labeled too hard. And he says, but that's the wrong way to think about integrity. In fact, he said that your integrity is something that can guide you in difficult and painful

moments. He says it's something to rely on when your perspective starts to blur. when rules and principles seem to be falling apart, when they waver. It says when you're faced with hard choices or right and wrong, he says, integrity is something that can keep you on the right track, right? The sense of being on the path not kept on it. And it's that integrity is something that can keep you afloat and you're drowning, right? They sometimes compare the stoic virtues, like the cardinal virtues, right?

People point out that's also what a compass is called, right? The cardinal points on a compass. I think justice, integrity, decency, honesty, fairness, this has to be the north star of that compass, right? You might be confused by everything that's happening. You might be confused by everything that's happening in the world. But you know what you're supposed to be doing, which is to say what is right.

And so we need these virtues, this value more than ever. because these are confusing and bewildering times.