The Daily Stoic - You’re Never Going to Be Perfect | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

The Stoics had high standards. They also understood that perfection was not possible.📚  The Stoic Virtues Series teaches the timeless principles of Courage, Discipline, Justice, and Wisdom through history’s greatest examples. Check out The Four Virtues Boxed Set here: https://dailystoic.com/virtuesboxset🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE | Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you! Grab tickets here |  https://www.dailystoiclive.com/🎙️ AD-FREE | 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/🎥 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. You're never going to be perfect. We have goals. We have standards. We have what we know we need to do. And then discipline. That key Stoic virtue determines whether we do it or not.

The problem is that some people seem to think that this discipline must be ironclad. And then they beat themselves when they fall short. The Stoics had high standards. They had important jobs. They had a lot they needed to do. They also understood that perfection was not possible. What was possible, Epictetus said, was striving to be better. What mattered, Mark Shrio said, was how quickly you picked yourself up after you were jarred by circumstances.

Sometimes we'll fall short. Sometimes we'll have to make an exception. Sometimes we're just plain forget our training and our standards. But it's like that famous line in the way. Steinbeck's East of Eden, which has a bunch of Stoic themes, actually open the Four Virtue series with a line from that. Adam Trask in the book, the character, he's been impossibly hard on himself. He's racked with guilt, and he's told by the family servant Lee, and now that you know you

don't have to be perfect, you can be good. And that's the point. We don't have to be perfect. We just have to choose to be good. We have that choice. We can begin again. we can still fight through it. Good is better than perfect because it's real. Good is better than perfect because it's human. It's the striving, the effort, the genuine desire to do what's right. Good is what we are.

And good is what we have to keep trying to be every day. Being an effective leader is difficult, right? You've got to keep your ego in check. You got to know how your business works, how the team operates for peak effectiveness. but most leaders are making decisions about their teams based on assumptions and not reality. And that's exactly the problem that today's sponsor, Scribe, was built to fix. Scribe Optimize passively captures how your team works across approved business apps, and it uses AI to automatically surface workflows, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities. No interviews, no manual discovery, no extra work for your team. Scribe is trusted by 80,000-plus enterprises, including nearly half of,

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For a limited time, WhatNot will match your first $150 sold in the first month. You just got to visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. W-H-A-T-N-O-T-com slash sell. What-N-O-C-C-Sel. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Soad Podcast. We're going to flash forward, actually, this back in time because it's going to go back to March of 22.

where I did a virtual talk for some FBI agents. They were on this strength and leadership retreat, and I zoomed in. I gave a little talk, and then I answered a couple questions. And again, it's always interesting to me to see different people and how they relate to Stoicism, what they take out of it, what they're thinking about. And again, I think whether I'm talking to school teachers or FBI agents, elected leaders, or I'm talking to school kids. This is one of my absolute favorite things to do.

So hopefully these questions will resonate with you. I thought it was an honor to talk to this group. Again, March 22 seems like absolutely forever ago. But here we are. Here is that Q&A. And I'll get right into it. You talk about we can't control our outcomes. We can control our reactions.

Yeah. I've learned you to talk about that for a couple of minutes. To me, that's the definition of stoicism, that we don't control what happens in the world, but we control how we respond to what happens in the world, right? When I talk to sports teams, I say some version this is like, look, the only thing you control is how you practice and how you play. Everything else is up to someone else. You don't control what the weather of game day is going to be.

You don't control whether you start. You don't control whether the coach hates you. You don't control what the media is saying about you. You don't control if the refs suck, right? You don't control any of it. You control what you do on this play right now. right? You control what you do. So for the Stoics, the idea is like, look, I control my emotions, I control my thoughts, I control the actions that I'm going to take within the constraints of

what's been, you know, sort of presented in front of me, like what the situation is, but that's it. And so having this more circumscribed notion of what's up to us and not up to us seems limiting, but it's actually really empowering. If you take for granted that most people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy focused on what other people are saying, what other people are thinking, right, whose fault it is, right? What it means, right? What caused it? All of this is rejecting the limited agency in front of you, which is, you know, what am I going to do right now? What am I going to do about it? So to me, that's what stoicism is. It's this sort of zooming in on what's up to me, and that's where I'm going to focus all my energy and thoughts because everything else is

wasted. I'll thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. As you were talking about stillness, it occurred. I'm not a particular religious person, but I go to church pretty much every week, and I try to make that a priority for my family. And it occurred to me only recently that that's a space for me where my mind can contemplate things in a way that I don't do all with long. Yes.

And I really try to protect that time. And it never really occurred to me why that is until we were just talking. So that's very much that space for me. No, I love that. Right. It's a place. It's rude to be on your phone. Right? You're not talking. You're just listening. It's also, you know, depending on where you go to church, usually a building designed to sort of engender that, to create a sense of awe and wonder. I mean, how rare that silence is. And then I think we need to carve out blocks of that because that's where ideas pop into our head. That's where we get clarity. That's where we calm down. I think we need those experiences if we want to access all parts of, you know, our toolkit.

So one of the other objects we're going to be discussing later today is the typical conversations with people as leaders often. We have in a tough challenging conversations, whether we're talking about some of these formats or on the right. How would it still approach that? What advice we do that or maybe they're studied knowledge on those typical conversations? Well, one of the things I've been thinking about that lately is like, you know, you've got to, let's say you've got to let someone go. You have to give someone some unpleasant feedback, whatever it is. I try to remind myself that the only way to get good at that is by practice doing it. So as much as I would rather not be doing it, I just try to remind myself that it's practice.

Right. So I try to go into it going, okay, I've only fired three people in my life. This is the fourth one. Right. So when I have to fire my 10th person 20 years from now, I'll be better for having gone through this. To me, that's kind of what the idea of the obstacle is the way is that these unpleasant, unchosen, undesirable situations are practice for harder things down the road. Right. So if we can go into it not being like, oh, I can't believe I have to do this. This sucks. This is unfair. This isn't going to be, this isn't going to be fun. I try to go, okay, I need practice calling up, you know, maybe for me, it's my publisher. I have to call and have a frank conversation with my publisher about, you know, something that's not going well. You know, I could shy away from that. I could see. if someone else could do it for me.

I could pretend I don't need to do it and just see if it magically resolves itself. Or I can go, okay, tomorrow, I'm picking up the phone and I'm going to do it and I'm going to be better for having done it. That's kind of how I think about those things. So, Ryan, you talked about the importance of personal hobbies and to reflect.

I think at least for me, the work light imbalance creeps up on you. Sure. time. Any thoughts on recognizing the signs that were not taking the time to reflect on how to make sure we do carve those time up? Yeah, I think those hobbies can kind of be a good canary in the coal mine that you're getting imbalance. Like, let's say it's, you know, maybe your activities are physical, or maybe you like working in your workshop or you like do an X, Y, or Z. When you haven't been able to do those things because you literally haven't had the time,

your work-life balance is probably a bit skewed. Obviously, all of us at different phases in our careers, different jobs, different things, you know, the amount of time or whatever is going to be different. But maybe coming up with some non-negotiables, like, hey, once a week I need to be able to do X or three times a week I need to be able to do Y. If I'm sacrificing those things, not doing those things, it's because I become in balance. And that might seem like I'm being respectful to my career. but in fact, if I want to do this thing for a long time,

I have to be able to be almost more disciplined about my discipline. You know, we think about great athletes. We have this vision that they just work all the time. You know, it's Kobe Bryant waking up at 4 in the morning or, you know, Tiger Woods hitting however many practice shots, whatever that is. But in truth, the number one cause of injury, the number one career ender for professional athletes, is over-training, right?

They get burned out or they push themselves too far and they hurt themselves in a way which they can't come back. And so, you know, realizing like, hey, I don't just want to be good at this this week, but I want to be good at this 15, 20, 30 years from now. It requires pacing yourself and having some self-control in that sense.