BONUS | 11 Things Stoics Never Do

0:00Ryan Holiday: We just got back from an amazing vacation in Italy. I'll bring you some clips from it over the next couple weeks. I recorded a bunch of stuff while we were there. Although it was as hot as it has literally ever been. It's one of the best family trips we've ever had. And we stayed in this amazing palazzo that we booked on Airbnb. It was like 500 years old. It had all these Roman funerary headstones in it, which is this crazy memento mori thing. It was like staying in a museum. The hosts were incredible. They lovingly restored this place. They took amazing care of it. And by listing their place on Airbnb, they get to share this amazing experience with people from all over the world and get funds to put towards upkeeping and restoring their place.

0:43Ryan Holiday: If you're planning a trip this summer, it's worth considering listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to help offset the cost of your vacation and earn a little extra money to put towards your next adventure. Your place might be worth more than you think. And all you got to do is go to airbnb.com slash host to find out more. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:14Ryan Holiday: If you want to be a better person, if you want to be a happier person, if you want to be a more productive person, here are all the things the Stoics want you to stop doing right now.

1:30Ryan Holiday: Number one, stop focusing on things that are outside your control. This is our main task in life, Epictetus says, to know what's up to us and what's not up to us.

1:43Ryan Holiday: Number two, stop doing the inessential things. Marks really says when we say no to what we shouldn't be doing, we get the double benefit of doing the essential things better. Number three, from Seneca, stop being distracted by what other people are doing. He said, you want to have a sense of the path that you're on. And he says, not to be led off course by the people who are hopelessly lost. Number four, from Zeno, let's talk more than we listen. He said, we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Number five, stop complaining. Marcus Reulis admonished himself not only not to complain, but not even to complain silently to himself.

2:30Ryan Holiday: Number six, stop putting things off. Seneca said this is the one thing all fools have in common. They're always getting ready to start. Don't be a fool. If it's worth doing, do it now, which leads us to the seventh. Stop acting as if you're going to live forever. Right? Marcus Reulis says we could be good today. Instead, we choose tomorrow. this is arrogant. This is foolish. Memento mori. Life is short. We could go at any moment. Stop putting it off. It's worth doing. Do it now because today is the only thing you have for certain. Eight, stop getting offended. Epictetus talks about how whenever we find ourselves getting upset, whenever we're offended, we have to say to ourselves, I am complicit in taking offense.

3:16Ryan Holiday: They said the thing. They did the thing. Then we told ourselves a story about it. We told ourselves that our feelings were hurt. We told ourselves that we were humiliated. We told ourselves that we were degraded. No, they said some words. They uttered some sounds. Then we decide what that means. That part of it is in our control. Number nine, stop letting your ego make you stupid. Epictetus talked about how we can't learn that which we think we already know. When you're a know-it-all, that's a problem because you're right. You can't know anything else. The better the ratio of listening to talking, right?

3:55The more you're going to learn, the better you're going to get.

3:59Ryan Holiday: Ten, and this is the most important. Stop acting as if you're going to live forever. Life is short. You could go at any moment. This is the stoic idea of memento mori, right? You could leave life right now, Mark Schroeder says in meditations. Let that determine what you do and say and think. stop putting things off, stop taking things personally, stop doing the things that you know you shouldn't be doing, get after it. This is your one life. Go live it. Eleventh, stop doing things out of anger. Stop letting anger rule your life. I'm not saying you have an anger problem. I'm just saying that anger is a problem for all of us.

4:38Ryan Holiday: The Stoics talk about how often what we do because we are angry is so much worse than the thing that made us angry in the first place. Seneca talked about the silliness of returning a kick to a mule or a bite to a dog. Mark Smith even talked about how unmanly it is to be overcome by your emotions, to punch a wall or to scream at someone or hurt someone, right? It's okay to be angry. The Stoics knew we would have these impulses, these feelings, but they wanted to make sure we didn't do things out of anger. Stoicism is about that pause. One of the pieces of advice that Athena Doris, the stoic teacher gives the emperor Augustus was to count all the letters of the alphabet before he made a decision while he was angry, right?

5:22Ryan Holiday: The pause and the reflect. Let me think about this for a second.

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