Could You Do This? | Do Your Job

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Hey there, just a heads up, I'm going to be on tour this fall. You can see me in Australia and New Zealand in October. In August, I'm mixing my months up here, but in August, you can see me in Chicago and Minneapolis and Detroit. Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that, dailystoiclive.com. Hope to see you there. Could you do this? Nobody likes to do it. Nobody likes to wait. Nobody likes to have to defer. Nobody likes to be overlooked or taken for granted or yoked to somebody else. It's been said that the most difficult instrument in the orchestra is second fiddle.

0:54Ryan Holiday: Can you imagine being Marcus Aurelius? He was chosen to succeed Hadrian, but first he had to learn under Antoninus. Except that Antoninus lives for another two decades. Think of the patience, the humility, the self-control, the endurance. It's frustrating to have to wait for six months, let alone six years. And nearly 36 % of Marcus's life was spent waiting for Antoninus to retire or pass away. But not only does Mark Shurelius put up with this, he uses it. He understood that power and responsibility were heavy things, that it was actually a gift to delay them. It was time with family, time to be normal.

1:36Ryan Holiday: He understood that it was a complex job he was taking over and that every minute of prior experience was a benefit, that every lesson was priceless. Life is going to ask you to wait sometimes. There will be people ahead of you. There will be things you have to learn. You're going to have to play second fiddle. And to be able to do this will require all of the stoic virtues. It will take wisdom to see that waiting is not wasted. It will take courage not to quit or complain. It will take justice to keep giving your best, even when the spotlight belongs to someone else. It will take discipline to hold your ego in check, to resist resentment, to keep showing up.

2:17Ryan Holiday: That's the question then. Could you do that? Could you wait without becoming bitter? Could you serve without being seen? Could you prepare without knowing exactly when your moment will come? You know, when I was working on the Stoed Virtue Series, I thought it'd be like a four-year series. Instead, it was like a six-plus year series. Stuff takes what it takes, and you've got to learn how to be patient. And patience and waiting, as I said, requires all those virtues, courage, discipline, justice, wisdom. If you want to grab a signed copy of the box set, you can. I will link to that in today's show notes.

2:51Ryan Holiday: I hope you check it out.

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5:17Ryan Holiday: Do your job. Whatever anyone does or says for my part, I'm bound to the good. In the same way an emerald or gold or purple might always proclaim, whatever anyone does or says, I must be what I am and show my true colors. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditation 715. This is from the Daily Stilic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living. by me, Ryan Holiday, and my friend, Stephen Hanselman. You can get this anywhere books are sold, audiobook, physical. We even have an awesome leather-bound edition in the Daily Stoic store. And you can check that out at dailystoic.com slash leather.

5:59Ryan Holiday: But let's get on to the meditation today. The Stoics believe that every person, animal, and thing has a purpose or place in nature. Even in ancient Greek and Roman times, they vaguely understood that the world was composed of millions of tiny atoms. It was this idea, this sense of the interconnected cosmos that underpinned their sense that every person, every action was part of a larger system. Everyone had a job, a specific duty. Even those who did bad things, they were doing their job of being evil because evil is unfortunately a part of life. The most critical part of this system was the belief that you, the student who has sought out stoicism, have the most important job.

6:42Ryan Holiday: To be good, to be wise, to remain the person that philosophy wished to make us, as Marcus Aurelius said. Do your job today. Whatever happens, whatever other people's jobs happen to be, do yours. Be good. This is one of my favorite entries in Marcus Aurelius. And, you know, it's funny. He talks about being good, doing good, talks about the common good, like dozens and dozens of times in meditations. because that is stoicism. Yes, it's an individual philosophy, but individual in the sense of that famous quote about being the change that you want to see in the world. And in fact, this is something with stoics say, if you want to see good, you do good.

7:29Ryan Holiday: We always have the ability to do our job. And in doing our job, we know the world is not totally lost, that it's not hopeless, that there is good because we can produce it. Marcus says that we're sort of a fountain of goodness. It's always bubbling up. Yes, sometimes it gets covered over by dirt or whatever, but we can dig it out. We can get that water flowing again. So that's the imperative today. What good can you do? I remember being in Boy Scouts as a kid, you know, do one good turn every day. What can you do? Can you hold the door open for someone? Can you give someone a compliment? Can you pay for someone's coffee?

8:06Ryan Holiday: Can you give an employee a few hours off? You know, what can you do? Who can you help? Who can you serve? What kind of difference can you make? And yes, this doesn't solve massive collective action problems. I understand that those those do exist. Those do need to be addressed. But think of the impact that this collective individual action can have. Yesterday, my two sons and I, we went on our morning walk. There was just so much trash by the side of the road. And we didn't have time to get it. It was starting to get bad. And we just, I said, you know what? We're going to get the ATV after dinner.

8:45Ryan Holiday: Instead of going for our evening walk, we're going to get a trash bag. We're going to pick all this up. We went out. It took about 30 minutes. We filled a giant trash bag with trash. It was fun. It was outside. They loved it. Oh, there's one. There's a piece. It was, you know, a fun little game. But here's the thing. when I went on the walk this morning, the goodness was there. It was visible. The trash was not there. And, you know, there's satisfaction in feeling like, hey, that didn't end up in a river somewhere. That didn't end up in a bird's stomach. Maybe it didn't end up in my stomach, right?

9:19Ryan Holiday: We made a tiny difference. And I'm going to walk by tomorrow. There's going to be more trash. No one's going to throw me a parade. I'm not going to get thanked for it. But I did it because it's my job. My job is to show my true colors to be good, to do good, to fight to be the person that philosophy wants to make us. That's what Stoicism is about. I'm really excited to think of all the good that the many, many, many, many thousands of listeners listening to this podcast can cumulatively do, not just in the future, but right now, today, when you stop listening to this message. Go out there, get at it.

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