BONUS | 3 Shows in 72 Hours

0:00Ryan Holiday: One of the things that keeps a lot of us from going to the gym is it's overwhelming, it takes time, it's expensive, you don't know if you're doing it right. Well, meet Tonal, the ultimate strength training system that tracks your progress to take the guesswork out of working out so you can have the confidence to keep pushing forward. Tonal provides the convenience of a full gym and the guidance of a personal trainer anytime at home with one sleek system. The whole thing is designed to reduce your mental load. Tonal is the ultimate strength training system, helping you focus less on workout planning and more on getting results.

0:40Ryan Holiday: Tonal does a quick assessment, sets the optimal weight for every move, and then it adjusts it in these little increments to help you get stronger so you're always challenged. And you can choose from a variety of expert-led workouts to keep you coming back for more. And right now, Tonal is offering our listeners$200 off their Tonal purchase with promo code TDS. That's tonal.com. Use promo code TDS for$200 off your purchase. Tonal.com promo code TDS for$200 off. Look, if you're not prepared for things to go wrong, you're not doing this stoicism thing right. I dropped my kids off at school, and I was supposed to go to the airport.

1:17I got to talk in Minneapolis today, Chicago tomorrow, Detroit the day after that. It's a pretty tight travel schedule. Not a lot of room for things to go wrong. But to start with a 30-minute delay, then a 40-minute delay, then a 50-minute delay, and now an hour and 10-minute delay is an inauspicious start. So instead of being crunched on the ground in Minneapolis, I went for a run here. And now I've got to figure out what I'm going to do because I can't shower before I get on the plane. So it's going to be interesting. But it's life period. You have the way you think things are supposed to go.

1:45You have your plans. But that's a proposal. and as they say, God disposes. And so the key to stoicism is ultimately to be flexible, which is going to be the name of the game for the next couple of days. That's what we're going to talk about in today's video. So I was on my way to Barton Springs. I was going to jump in the water, and so I wasn't all sweaty on the plane. And then they moved it up 45 minutes. So now I've got to be flexible with my flexible plants, but I made it with, I don't know, 10 minutes to spare. So I went from being frustrated I was going to have to sit around waiting to now I'm rushing.

2:20That's just how it goes.

2:28Three things people get wrong about the Stoics. Number one, that it's emotionlessness. This is totally wrong. Yes, Stoicism is about being less emotional. That's very different than being emotionless. The Stoics get angry. They just try not to do things out of anger. The Stoics feel urges. They just try not to let that urge or that emotion drive the car. Two, Stoicism is passivity, people think, right? No, no. Stoicism is about understanding what's in your control and what's outside your control, and then focusing all your energy on what is in your control. If the Stoics were passive, they wouldn't have inspired the founders who were literal political revolutionaries.

3:13The Stoics did practice acceptance, sure, but that was only the things that were outside their control. The things that are up to you, that gets a full 100 % of our effort because it's the only place that that makes a difference. And finally, this idea of memento mori, right? Remember you are mortal, that this is somehow depressing. It's the exact opposite. It's designed to be invigorating, designed to put things in perspective, designed to give your life meaning. The practice of memento mori isn't about taking life away. It's the exact opposite. It gives you your life right now

3:54Yes, so we'll do the

4:13You don't have to put it up, you just put it up online. Just write it, figure out what it is. Do you have two Memento Mori? So I've got Memento Mori and Memento Bavari. Wow, very cool. Yeah. I love it. Alright, nice. Thank you, have a good one. What do you want me to make them out to? Sterling. Alright, S-T-E-R.

4:40I've never even seen it that way. Yeah, very cool. I like this. Thanks a little slower here. Yeah, Brian, Zach. Hi. How are you? I'm doing great yourself. You've been through this a couple times. Yes, you've been awesome and a huge, huge inspiration.

5:03Ryan Hall.

5:12For the Stoics, being able to engage with and talk to people you disagree with, to be able to wrestle with ideas that maybe are on their face a bit repugnant or scary or disagreeable to you, that is a really important thing. And it's not always so, you know, severe. Sometimes it's just, what does this Stoic think or that Stoic think and where do they disagree? But I think going to the people and places and ideas and schools of thought that you're not familiar with or maybe that you have a little bit of an aversion to and immersing yourself in that either you're going to learn something or it's going to inoculate you against that idea because you understand it better and both of those outcomes are good and we need a lot more of that awesome thank you guys very much it was an honor i really appreciate it the city's so inspiring thank you all very much

6:02do i pick the cities that i talk in because i want to go running there not exactly but uh close enough. I'm running in Minneapolis this morning. I didn't get to do it yesterday because the flight delays. I'm six and a half miles in. I got about a mile and a half to go. It's crazy to me. I'm here at the beginning of the Mississippi River and about a week and a half ago I was running in New Orleans along the very end of the Mississippi River. In wisdom I talk about Abraham Lincoln doing that whole journey by boat and what he learned along the way. It doesn't really have anything to do with what's going on this morning but I am going to talk about Lincoln quite a bit tonight in Chicago.

6:40Maybe the greatest person to ever come from Illinois. So that's what I'm thinking about this morning. Got a nice run in. Remember what Seneca says, retreat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. I like to push myself of course but mostly I go for the run in the morning to help regulate myself, to get myself calm, to get a win in early in the morning. It doesn't matter how the rest of the day goes. The talk could go horribly. I started the day off right i got up early i did my run i'm gonna do a little writing then i'm gonna go to the airport it's a great day however the gig goes from there is a bonus all right so it's uh 8 30 we're on our way to the airport talking chicago tonight they just told me over a thousand tickets which is pretty crazy minneapolis was good yesterday went for a long run this morning and now we've got two hours for the flight, it should be a short flight.

7:34I'm talking about contingency plans, I need the math if there's no problem with the flight. As long as we get in the car by one o 'clock, we can drive there and still make it. So you want to have your backup and then your backup to your backup. But we're feeling good.

8:08The secret to wisdom, Seneca said, was simple. He said you just got to find one thing a day. He said find a quote, find an idea, find an insight, and he says thoroughly digest it every day. Ten years ago we started the Daily Stoic email about that very idea. A few thousand people signed up. But in the decades since, it's grown a little bit. that over a million people get the Daily Stoic email every day. It goes out all over the world, and it's one piece of Stoic wisdom designed to help you live a better life right here and right now. And you can sign up for it totally for free at dailystoic.com slash email.

8:44You can unsubscribe whenever you want. There's no spam. The Daily Stoic email is the thing I'm proudest of, that I work hardest on.

8:49Ryan Holiday: And if you want to add Stoicism to your life, you can sign up right now.

9:00So I found Stoicism one through him being on The Daily Show and him talking with Jordan Klepper and speaking on the book Daily Dad, as well as I was just having a hard time in life a couple years ago and I just threw myself into all the books that were available including like his older stuff. I just found it very interesting how he went about everything. I actually studied Stoicism in college, degree in theology, but it was purely academic at the time. And then I discovered this book and realized how it could really be applied to life and really be life changing. So Stoicism has a whole different meaning now from me because of my own holiday.

9:42What brought me to Stoicism, I played college athletics and just dealing with the diversity of sports, going through injuries, losses, those types of adversity really helped pique my interest in psoicism. Also, I was a philosophy major in college, so all those types of things really piqued my interest. And I found Ryan playing college sports when he did a talk for the Cubs, so it's just been really interesting for me to learn about and apply in my life. My brother gave me the book The Art of Living Manual, and I loved the daily short reads on it, little paragraphs, and that brought me to The Daily Stoic to kind of just keep that rhythm going and acceptance of life and what I can control and can't control.

10:33Jocko Willink had a book out, Discipline is Destiny, and he had Ryan on there, and I listened to that podcast, and it really resonated with me, so I looked into it and then I found discipline is destiny and I got hooked. Here we are. And then my brother found it and told me about Ryan and I was hooked from a day like I looked him up found the daily dad and I I've been hooked ever since. He's incredible. He's changed how I look at life. Epictetus's question was who is your master? What is your master? It doesn't matter what your job is, doesn't matter what your title is, doesn't matter what your legal status is, what is controlling you?

11:19And so for the Stoics, discipline was then not just a way to freedom, it was freedom. It was freedom from these things that would otherwise be depriving you of your autonomy. Guys, this has been amazing. I'll let you get home. Thank you so much for coming. It's been an honor. Thank you for the support. Come up, I'll sign that thing for you. Bring me your book. They'll take care of it. Thank you, guys.

11:44Ryan Holiday: Hey, guys.

11:48Ryan Holiday: Look, it's been a while since I've had to fill out an expense report. That's one of the perks of not having a job. But I don't remember enjoying the experience. And certainly, I don't want my employees to waste a bunch of their time doing it. You know, you've got to find the receipt. You've got to guess what category it goes in. then finance is asking you, well, what about this? Or are you sure this was proper? Or, you know, what if you didn't have to do any of that? It's bad use of your time. That's bad use of company time. Expense reports are tedious. It's not what I want my employees doing.

12:22Ryan Holiday: Well, Ramp makes collecting and submitting expenses super simple. With Ramp, expenses submit themselves. You just text or email your receipt and Ramp categorizes codes and submits it. And when you book business travel with Ramp, They find the best flights and hotels you're actually allowed to book. You don't find out later that your company's only partially going to cover it. Ramp is the only finance platform that employees and finance teams both rave about. And companies have saved over$12 billion with Ramp. I think every business owner, every employee is trying to find tools that reduce the amount of admin process that they have to go through.

12:57Ryan Holiday: And Ramp helps you do that. Ramp helps your team save time with one of those most tedious admin tasks. Time is money. Save both with Ramp. New customers get$250 off at ramp.com slash daily stoic. Go to ramp.com slash daily stoic. This time of year, something's always going wrong at the worst possible moment. And look, your customers don't care who fixes it. They just care who answers first. And if they try to get you and they miss you, they'll go to someone else. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the business phone built so you never miss a call or a customer.

13:36Ryan Holiday: It is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90 ,000 businesses who rely on it to stay reachable and look professional every day. All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up the conversation, see the full history and respond fast and quote integrates with the tools your team already uses HubSpot, Zapier, Claude, whatever. And it helps you save time, stay organized and spend less effort chasing down information between systems money is on the line always say hello with quo try quo for free plus get 20 off your first six months when you go to quote.com slash daily stoic that's q uo.com slash daily stoic so we're at the chicago airport now it is 9 a.m and then we are flying to detroit for the last gig i got up i went for this run this morning We stayed near O 'Hare.

14:30I remember like nine years ago maybe I stayed not in the same hotel but in a similar hotel. And I went for this run in this random park and it had like the biggest, tamest deer that I've ever seen in my life. Just in the center of Chicago. And somehow I found myself in that park this morning and I saw this huge buck and then a couple of doe. It made me think it's almost deer season. That was weird. but now now we're on our way to Detroit I've got to figure out what I'm gonna say I don't want to do the same talk in each city so I've got to come to what I'm gonna say I was only able to think as far as Chicago so now hopefully on the plane I can put some time into the next one and then I gotta go home and pick my kids up from school tomorrow do you know what Thomas Edison said when his factory this factory was burning down he grabbed his son who was shell-shocked their life's work his inheritance going up in flames and he said go get your mother and all her friends they'll never see a fire like this again and supposedly he paces up and down watching this surreal fire which is throwing all these weird colors and heat up into the air and he starts to repeat that line from Kipling's if about meeting triumph and disaster all the same and he really means this the next day he tells reporters you know I've been through things like this before.

15:49He says it prevents an old man from being afflicted with ennui. He says it's going to prevent me from getting bored. And in fact, the final act of his life is throwing himself into the rebuilding, into more inventions, into more work. And instead of taking the route of despair and disappointment and grievance, he takes the route of inspiration and urgency and renewed focus. It's this stoic idea of amor fati. You can't do anything about the fire. You can't put it out. It's gone. All of it's going to burn down. That's what technology was at the time. But you can choose how you respond. You can choose what you make of it.

16:23You can choose what you turn it into. You can choose the story you tell yourself about it. That is stoicism. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to what happens. We don't run away from our fate. We embrace our fate when we allow it to make us better in ways that we couldn't have possibly ever imagined. And that happened right

16:49here. Hi, how old are you guys? I'm 17. 17 and 14 nice. I'm the one that originally turned me on to you. Oh this was great thanks for bringing them. I'm so grateful for you. How old are you? I'm 24. I actually found stoicism because of Brian Holiday. I was listening to Chris Squamo on SXM and he was interviewing Ryan Holiday and that was kind of the beginning of my whole journey. From there I got his books and that got me into Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and all of them and kind of started this whole journey into the great conversation. So that's how. Okay, it's my husband. He loves it and he reads it so I get it by osmosis.

17:30How did you find Stoicism? I heard Ryan on Tim Ferriss' podcast 100 years ago, maybe 2012, and then dove into his books and I went to Stoicon in 2017 to see Ryan talk. So I was hooked from there. What brought me to Stoicism? I believe Stoicism found me. I was searching for self and trying to find answers to questions that I thought had to be answered. And by finding truth, I found Ryan's work through Ego is the Enemy and it changed everything and how I live in life. Huge thanks to Ryan for that and his work and also his bravery. So I found Stoicism, especially as a teacher. I work with middle school kids, and in particular, middle school kids are the most emotional people that you'll ever be around, especially seventh grade.

18:14And so, in particular, I wanted to find something that is, kind of grounds me, kind of keeps me motivated, kind of keeps me focused on what I need to do. And just as a teacher, as a parent, as a husband. It's not gesture, man. I happen to be kind of floating through Spotify, kind of looking at podcasts and stuff like that. Happened to find Ryan, really enjoyed it. Ended up reading a lot of his books and just ended up, it just connected. It just all clicked and it really, really helped. For me, it started, I'm a cancer doctor and I was trying to find a way to provide guidance not only for my patients on how to deal with the mental struggle and the psychological burden of having a cancer diagnosis.

18:57But as a physician, caring for these patients, trying to find a way that I could deal with that burden as we experience it as a physician, as a clinician, that's separate from just the amount of burnout that is throughout healthcare right now. And so I stumbled upon Ego is the Enemy over a decade ago and got hooked. And since then, I've been following Ryan. I've introduced Ryan and his work to my family. so they could learn about stoicism in a way that's digestible, that doesn't have the complexity that philosophy may have in a graduate program, but that you can understand and really look at how you apply it because we're all on this journey.

19:42And sometimes that reminder, those daily stoic messages, both all of us actually have Ryan's daily stoic, and we go through that and it helps us kind of keep grounded. It's a great way to start the day. My wife follows his podcast. you could talk about how stoicism has impacted your work and your life. I actually did a PhD in career goal formation and looking at how we kind of wind up where we are in our careers and I find that Brian's philosophy really just resonates on a day-to-day basis because I work with counseling and working with students and sometimes difficult conversations and kind of going through that.

20:22And there's so many things I've learned through just his podcast, through his writings, through his philosophies, to the point where we've actually shared it with the kids. And the kids have actually shared it with friends and have just kind of gone through. And it's actually helped with some of the day-to-day life anxieties that kids face. And just it's been one of those things that really grounds us as a family. And we feel blessed to be able to come here and to meet him today personally. And this is a birthday gift for him. Yeah, so this was a birthday gift, and just two days after her high school graduation, I fell down the stairs.

20:56I ruptured my quadricep and my tricep, and so I entered the world of Epictetus. And poor Ruby has dealt with me saying, sweetheart, you have to read the Enchiridia, and you have to read the Discourses. And it's been a journey, and this is our first outing since my injury. And what a great way to just stay grounded and hear about Stoicism and how it impacts our life. So I'm just blessed to be here, thankful for that. I'm not quite sure how I found Stoicism, but I know that when I found Ryan Holiday, I had found Stoicism. I don't know if I knew anything about it before then, but he piqued my interest, so I looked further into it, and I read Discipline is Destiny.

21:39That was my first Ryan Holiday book, and it changed my life. He was so inspiring with all of the stories that he gave us about it really is dedication to your art. It really is about showing up every day, doing the same thing, doing the boring stuff, and never, ever giving up. That thought stopped me from forever thinking that somebody had something special. It was in their DNA. They had all the breaks. That's not the case. It truly is about your personal dedication and what you bring to your mission. That is what changes everything. Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise and welcome to the stage, Brian Paulding.

22:38I committed this summer to do a 50k in Rome and my first ultra marathon and I will tell you when I got there and it was literally the hottest it has ever been in Europe I had some second thoughts right actually I would run most mornings and just hope that I would roll my ankle on a cobblestone just just give me any excuse to not have to do this and actually the crazy thing is I really didn't have to do it. Like I had committed to doing it, but not publicly. I could have quit at any moment and no one would have known. I just wouldn't have told you about it. Discipline is what sustains us when we're doing the thing that no one can make us do, right?

23:16I think the virtue for the Stoics is not enforced discipline from above. It's not discipline if you could get shot for not doing it or if you get thrown in jail for not doing it. It's discipline if you're doing it under your own volition. And I'll tell you in the middle of the run, I thought many times about quitting also. That's one of the things you learn when you do hard things is you learn not to trust that impulse. You develop muscles doing hard physical activity, sure, but the most important muscle is that one that allows you to override the part of you that wants to quit, the part of your body that is screaming to quit, right?

23:53It's not fun while you're doing it, but you feel invigorated and stimulated when you get out. At the very least, you are proud of yourself for doing that thing that you know was uncomfortable and difficult. Have a safe drive home. Thank you. Good night. All right, well, that is three gigs in three days. I'm exhausted. I am drenched in sweat. I'm very much ready to go home. I think it was fun. It was enjoyable. I got to reach people. That's all great. We got better at what I do. That's what it's all about. Can you get a little bit better every day? I talked about this in one of the talks about discipline.

24:30Discipline is about getting a little bit better each time, learning something each time, putting yourself a little bit out there, a little bit more out there each time. I feel like I did that. And I also got to meet some wonderful people. This kid asked me a question yesterday that almost made me cry. It's been a wonderful experience. And now I got to go home, not stay up too late and get up very early to catch a flight home I want to pick up my kids tomorrow. If you want to see me come to a talk, well, you're too late for this one, but you can come see me in Nashville, in Boston in November. You can also see me in DC, in Philly in December.

25:05So I'm gonna be all over the world bringing Stoicism straight to you. And you grab tickets at dailystoiclive.com.

25:20Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle slash workspace with Gemini. That's G-O-O dot G-L-E slash workspace with Gemini.