Do You Know Where to Find It? | Why Does Ancient Wisdom Still Surprise Us?

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1:07Ryan Holiday: You can check them out at Rayneo.com, use promo code STOIC, R-A-Y-N-E-O.com, code STOIC. stoic. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues—courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom—into the real world.

1:30Ryan Holiday: Do you know where to find it? We might not know it's what we're doing, but we are. We are, like the main character in Walker Percy's famous novel, The Moviegoer, engaged in the search. The search for what? For truth, for meaning, for practical wisdom that tells us how to handle this confusing thing called life. Bing Spoling, Percy's character, like the author himself, finds some of that in the little bits of stoic wisdom that his aunt passes him in the form of notes. And as it happens, this is a timeless tradition she is participating in, one much older than the American South anyway. In his letters, Seneca tells his friend Lucilius that the key to a good life was to acquire one little bit of wisdom every day.

2:14Ryan Holiday: Something to protect against poverty, against death, to fortify oneself against life's misfortunes, he says. And after you have run over many thoughts, Seneca wrote, select one to be thoroughly digested that day. That's stoicism, a philosophy to help us in our search. A place to find answers. But where do we start? Ten years ago, it's Ryan, by the way, I started writing a book around answering that question. It was called The Daily Stoic, and it was supposed to be one bit of Stoic wisdom every day. One day a quote from Marcus, one day from Epipetus or Seneca, plus a little meditation on what they meant and how to apply it.

2:55Ryan Holiday: And ten years later, and over three million copies later, my publisher was nice enough to let me have another go at it. They let me add new quotes from more of the Stoics. They let me improve the stories, fix mistakes. And, you know, in those 10 years, my own study of Stoicism has gotten better. My search has yielded some lessons, and I wanted to add all of that. When it came out, the Daily Stoic was the first collection of all the Stoics in centuries. Probably the only one to ever put them in a page-a-day format. It was accessible and digestible to help you get incrementally better each day. And now I think it itself is better because everything is about this iterative process.

3:35Ryan Holiday: So I'm really excited to announce the 10-year anniversary edition of The Daily Stoic. We have signed numbered first editions, which I'll link to in today's show notes. And we've got a new edition of The Leather One that will be coming here shortly as well. I'll link to all of that. Thanks to everyone who supported Daily Stoic over the years. Thanks to everyone who's bought the book, read the book, pressed the book in other people's hands. So it's been an honor. Let's keep it going. I'll see you in another 10 years, hopefully. Check out the new book. Really proud of it. Talk soon.

4:15Ryan Holiday: So last week, sort of a last minute thing, I ended up having a talk to do in New York City. So I dropped my kids off at school, had our Daily Stoic staff meeting, flew to New York, got in pretty late woke up early and met my friend Casey Neistat for a run well actually we were supposed to meet at Chelsea Piers it was like a mile from my hotel but I ran a mile in the wrong direction first that was that was lovely and I was so convinced I was going in the right direction it was really embarrassing anyways we finally linked up I ran with him back down to his house then by the time I turned around and ran back I did uh 11 and a half miles which was a little more than I wanted to do on the morning before I had to do a talk, but it went well.

4:57Ryan Holiday: It was a lovely morning. Some people asked me some interesting questions from the audience, which I wanted to share. And then I went down on the way to the airport to the real reason I was in New York City, which is there's this vintage shop, like maybe a half a block down from The Strand, one of the great bookstores in the United States. It's called Metropolis Vintage. And, you know, know, you're always seeing me in vintage clothes. There's actually a great new vintage shop here that just opened on Main Street and Bastrop 2 called Good Old Habit. So pretty much if you see me in a band shirt or a vintage shirt or whatever, it's either a shirt I got myself at a concert 20 years ago, or Riva picked it out for me at Good Old Habit, or on a trip to New York, I grabbed it from Metropolis Vintage on Broadway.

5:40Ryan Holiday: Those aren't ads. I just wanted to give you a little glimpse into my life before I bring you this Q &A. As far as an ad is concerned, though, I'm going to be doing a bunch of talks in October in Australia and New Zealand, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Auckland, the 13th through the 21st. I screwed up the order on that, but you can grab those tickets at dailystoiclive.com, or you can see me in Boston, Nashville, Philadelphia, or DC in November and December, dailystoiclive.com. So let me just bring you some of these questions from New York City, because I thought it was interesting. And then hopefully you can ask me a question whether you are down under or in the United States here in October, November, or December.

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7:30Ryan Holiday: I want to go back to my sweaters. Usually wear sweaters when I'm on stage or when I'm recording stuff, but not like around, not during the day because it's like, I don't know, 100 degrees here still. But I got some great sweaters from Quince that I am excited to wear. I got some last year. I picked some new ones out and they're just hanging on the shelf ready to go into the rotation. Quince has got great t-shirts, they've got great light sweaters, and everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80 % less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup.

8:06Ryan Holiday: And Quince goes way beyond clothing. They've got sofas and ceramic cookware, premium bedding. It's the kind of brand you can end up recommending to everyone for everything. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the U.K. too. And when Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was The Daily Stoic. It's the best way to support the show. Quick follow-up. I'm working. Can I write that reading memo using AI? And do I need it edited afterwards?

8:43Ryan Holiday: I'm a little bit serious on that. Here's why you can't. It's for the same reason that your kids can't have AI write their school essay. The point is not the essay. The point is to be the person on the other side of having written the essay or the memo. Joan Didion famously said that writing is a hostile act, meaning I'm trying to not just figure out what I think. I'm trying to make you think what I think. And the idea of outsourcing this is to totally miss the point of I have to sit down and figure this thing out and then I have to figure out how to persuade you how to do it and it's not just the memo of course but it's being the person who knows what's in the memo and why it's in the memo and did the thinking and the research and the understanding to get there and from what I understand how Amazon does this is it's not just like you sit down and write this memo but like you write a draft and your team floats it around.

9:47It's a collaborative thing. So so yes, everyone's sitting down and reading it at the meeting. But it's not like surprise. Everyone's got to read this this three page paper. This is a collective process that is winnowing down. The other story I tell as George Marshall, chief staff, US Army, get attacked on Pearl Harbor. He has this sort of he's trying to find good talent, who's going to help you know america sort of uh very rapidly go into this war and so he's calling this series of generals into his office and one of them is a young dwight eisenhower and he says you know hey you just got attacked what's the plan all the generals before eisenhower just sort of spouted off an answer eisenhower is the only one that says can i have a couple hours and a desk marshall says shirt and Eisenhower goes and he sits down and he writes out like a strategy paper where he flushes out his ideas and then he gives a summary of those ideas to Marshall.

10:49There's probably nothing in this memo that Marshall had himself not already considered. What strikes him about Eisenhower is that he took the time to think about it and he took the time to articulate what he thought about it and he could do it in a coherent and a persuasive way that he realizes is that he actually has what it takes to execute that strategy. And I think Marshall said something like, okay, go do it. But that was the genius of Eisenhower. You know, he wasn't like this brave, swashbuckling soldier. He was a great administrator. He was a great communicator. He was a great strategic mind, which ultimately, to be the supreme allied commander of this largest army in the history of the world, that was the skill set actually needed.

11:36Maybe talk a little bit more about journaling or if journaling is writing something, like one of the other ways to... Yeah, you know, it's funny, I talk a lot about media dive, one of my first books is about media manipulation, but it's funny, I usually tell people, like, if you're not running a hedge fund, you should probably watch a lot less real-time news. Now, it's a little bit different for people who are actually in the business where, you know, news moves markets. most of your average people are just consuming way too much real-time information, too much breaking news, and not enough sort of real wisdom or history.

12:09But I think even in the world where a policy or politics or, you know, markets where you do have to have a sense of what's happening day to day, even then, you know, most of the things that are happening now are going to be better understood the more of a historical or a philosophical perspective you have. And so I think, you know, people are just not reading enough. They're not going, they're not reading enough literature. They're not reading enough history. They're not reading enough biography. They're not reading enough philosophy. They're not reading enough psychology. It's like understanding the underlying human factors that are influencing this stuff.

12:53So I really urge people to look at their media diet. And just like you might be looking at stock or a property or an investment and going, you know how long is this going to be a good business how long is this going to last ask yourself when you're dealing with information like what's the half life of this information do you spend a lot of time consuming things that don't hold up a friend of mine was saying you know think back ten years can you remember any articles that you read and probably not but you can think of some books or you can think of conversations that you have and so just I think the information diet is a big one journaling yeah it's great I know I'm obviously repeating myself as far as writing, but just quiet time where you're sitting and reflecting is really important.

13:40And then I think there's a reason that almost all artists and all philosophers had some sort of a walking habit. Like there's something I think we are designed to think on the move. In fact, like the oldest evidence we have of humans on this continent are some footprints in white sands national park of like a mother walking with her child like it's so long ago that her footsteps are crossed by like giant sloths and all these species that don't exist anymore and so like i try to take my phone calls walking um i try to you know uh if it's a short distance i try to walk even in the summer in texas got my kids this dog they promised me they would walking, of course they don't, but like am I taking it for the walk or is it taking me for the walk?

14:28Like I'm getting the benefit out of it. There's some physical benefits to walking but to me it's mostly in the in the cognitive and emotional benefits, the regulation, and then very rarely have I come back from the walk and not like been calmer and a little more clear-eyed about whatever it was that I was dealing with before I started the walk. So your first part of your time really struck me that you know this is a 2000 year old you know wisdom that seems new every time we hear about it right so the question that i have is what about human nature makes that so

15:03Ryan Holiday: surprising every time we hear this you know what what what are we reverting to that we need to relearn this every 10 years that's a great question i mean what's so striking too is like uh there's this huge overlap between stoicism and buddhism and it's thousands of years older than and Stoicism and as far as we know, they sort of developed totally independently, although the Romans made contact with the Han Dynasty in China during Marcus Graebus' reign. We don't know what they brought back exactly, we don't know, but there is something crazy about all these schools kind of independently coming to the same basic conclusions, which you're right, we promptly forget, get distracted about, and it's only when we sort of bump into the hard truths or the unpleasant realities of you know sort of how powerless we are or how short life is um that we go you know what has anyone dealt with this before and it's like yes literally every person who ever existed dealt with this before and and i think that's of course also the case for reading right um we we talk a lot about learning by experience but obviously it's better to learn from the experiences of others.

16:18And there have been people in moments like this before. Like, we think of the ancient world as this sort of, you know, peaceful, idyllic place. Like, you know, Socrates, the world is falling apart in Socrates' life. Talking about Thucydides' trap. He lived through the Peloponnesian War. He fights in it. He lives through a time in Athens known as the time of the 30 Tyrants. It sounds pretty bad. So we forget that there have always been times like these. And people were always worried about what was happening next. They were rattled by what had just happened. They were dealing with, alternatively, prosperity or disaster.

17:05And they wrote about it. And they talked about it. And they sort of distilled it down to some basic operating principles that, you know, for all the changes and all the improvements like life expectancy is better you know i'd rather live in our politics than marx aurelius's politics like everything is so much better in so many ways but the fundamental truths about what it is to be a person is there i mean there's a passage in marx's meditation book five that he opens where he's like doesn't want to get out of bed that morning because it's cold and and he's like is this what you were put here to do to like huddle under these blankets and stay warm and i just think there's something where in when you see something like that all the time and distance and culture falls away and somehow you find yourself relating to a seemingly unrelatable person's experience but you know his favorite philosopher who was an enslaved person.

18:07And so, yeah, we have way more in common and way more things are the same than they are different and have changed.