The Daily Stoic

Latest Episodes:

If You Want To Be Powerful | Practice Silence Oct 03, 2022

Show notes

Since the time of the Stoics, people have aspired to command great armies. To accumulate great fortunes. To hold high office. To be famous. To be important. In short, humans have longed to (and continue to) chase power.

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder.

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How To Be Content: The Search For The Good Life Pt. 1 Oct 02, 2022

Show notes

Today’s episode is an excerpt from Stephen Harrison’s How To Be Content: An Ancient Poet's Guide for an Age of Excess published by Princeton University Press. In this chapter Horace talks about being content with what you have, the different philosophical ideas that lead us to living “the good life.” and more.

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Russ Roberts on Making Better Decisions Oct 01, 2022

Show notes

Ryan talks to economist and author Russ Roberts about his new book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, the tension between being ambitious and being a good person, strategies for reducing the fear and the loss of control that inevitably come when a wild problem requires a leap in the dark, and more.

Russ Roberts is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem and the John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Russ is interested and invested in making complicated ideas understandable. He is the founder and host of the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk—hour-long conversations with interesting thinkers.His two rap videos on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes and F.A. Hayek, created with filmmaker John Papola, have had more than twelve million views on YouTube, have been subtitled in eleven languages, and are used in high school and college classrooms around the world.

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

No More Than This Is Required | Ask Daily Stoic Sep 30, 2022

Show notes

We are impressed by people who do incredible things–whether it’s creating some great work of art or pulling off some impossible athletic feat, bringing about social change or building an enormous organization. How did they do it? Where did that come from? Sometimes to excuse our own failures, we tell ourselves it was genius or genetics, inspiration rather than perspiration.

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is available for pre-order now! We’ve put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder.

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s Hard To Be a Person In This World | Your Actual Needs Are Small Sep 29, 2022

Show notes

Even if the changes are positive, we can appreciate that they’ve been difficult for people. There is so much to navigate, to be sensitive to in this modern world of ours. People are expected to be tolerant of things that just a few years ago were considered totally out of the mainstream. Words and descriptors, even the names of countries (or the pronunciations of the names of cities) seem to change by the day (with painful consequences if you screw them up)...

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Find The Space Sep 28, 2022

Show notes

Think about the last time that someone made you upset. What did they say? What did they do? Now think back: How did you react? What did you say? What did you feel?

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

David Maraniss on Why We Study the Greats Sep 28, 2022

Show notes

Ryan talks to author and journalist David Maraniss about his approach to his work, and his most recent book: Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, which is an epic biography on the trials of America’s greatest all-around athlete.

David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched Into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award. A Good American Family is his twelfth book.

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the Win | Discipline Is Destiny: The Four Virtues Sep 27, 2022

Show notes

Before he was a big time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to make it big. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because the question implies that doing comedy is a means to an end—the Netflix special, selling out the stadium, doing this, getting that.

“No, no, no,” he said, “I get to do comedy…I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work. I’m on house money, full time.”

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Discipline Now…Freedom Later | Pain Is Self-Inflicted Harm Sep 26, 2022

Show notes

At a critical moment in The Odyssey, Odysseus tied himself to the mast of his ship because he knew he wouldn’t be able to resist steering the ship toward the beautiful sound of the Sirens. In temporarily giving up his freedom, Odysseus became the first person ever to hear the Sirens without fatally crashing into the rocks surrounding the island where they lived.

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Memento Mori: The Reminder You Desperately Need Sep 25, 2022

Show notes

Who wants to think about death?

In his Meditations—essentially his own private journal—Marcus Aurelius wrote that “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” That was a personal reminder to continue living a life of virtue NOW, and not wait.

Epictetus, urged his students: “Keep death and exile before your eyes each day, along with everything that seems terrible— by doing so, you’ll never have a base thought nor will you have excessive desire.” Use those reminders and meditate on them daily—let them be the building blocks of living your life to the fullest and not wasting a second.

Death doesn’t make life pointless but rather purposeful. And fortunately, we don’t have to nearly die to tap into this. A simple reminder can bring us closer to living the life we want.

🪙 Get a Memento Mori Medallion to remember this message: https://store.dailystoic.com/products/memento-mori

🗓 Get a Memento Mori Calendar at https://dailystoic.com/mmcalendar

✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.