Heal Yourself With This | The Cure for a Reading Slump

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.

0:15Ryan Holiday: Heal yourself with this. Sometimes life gets heavy. Relationships dissolve. The job you thought you'd have forever disappears without warning. Someone you love gets a difficult diagnosis. us. It stings. Stoicism is designed as medicine for the soul. It relieves us of the vulnerabilities of modern life and restores us with the vigor we need to thrive. That's why the Stoics urged us to read, to study, and to journal, not as abstract philosophy, but to help us recover from the stuff life throws at us. Don't return to philosophy as a taskmaster, Mark Cerelius says in meditations, but as patients seek out the relief in treatment of sore eyes or a dressing for a burn or from an ointment.

1:01Ryan Holiday: Regarding it this way, you'll obey reason without putting it on display and rest easy in its care. Musonius Rufus also believed that we could be like doctors, treating ourselves with reason. The power to think clearly, to get to the truth of the matter. That is how we recover from being bashed around by our emotions or from world events. He was not interested in shortcuts, he said, or smelling salts that revive, but do not cure the disease. So that's what philosophy does. It cures what ails our souls. So check in with it today and let it do its healing.

1:44Ryan Holiday: So you're stuck, right? You're not reading as much as you want. You got a bunch of books piled up. Life got busy. Maybe you're a bit of a reading rut. What do you do? How do you get back on track if you're not reading as much as you'd like? As an author, I read as part of my job, but I get stuck too. We all do. Reading slumps are real and you can get real stuck in them. Usually when I'm stuck or I'm not reading as much as I want, I have three go-to options. Either something really short, something I read a page a day of, or just something that's gonna rip your face off. It is so good. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode.

2:26Ryan Holiday: Because the way out of a reading rut is to find the right book. I've been doing that for the last 20 years, not just in my own habits as a reader, but now owning my own bookstore. And it's a little bit different than your average bookstore. At The Painted Porch, we don't carry all books. We carry only books that are amazing, like the kinds of books that can change your life. The ones that have changed my life or my wife's life. The kind of books that are so good, you're going to think, where has this been? why haven't I read this yet? Come with me. Let's go next door. And I'm going to give you some books that are so good.

2:55Ryan Holiday: They're going to blow your mind. This is one of my absolute favorite genres of books, the daily devotional. You read one page a day every day for a year. And then ideally you read it year after year. And even though the book stays the same, you bring something different to it each time and you take something different out of each time. These are some of my favorites. One of the classics of the genre is Tolstoy's Calendar of Wisdom. This book was actually banned shortly after it came out by Soviet Russia, and it was only rediscovered in the late 80s, but just absolutely incredible book with his favorite quotes from the Stoics, from Chinese wisdom, from the Bible, from the transcendentalists, the greats in so many different eras.

3:34Ryan Holiday: I love this book. This is one I read every single day. I can take credit. This book was my idea. I love Robert Green's books, but people, should I start with the 40 laws of power, laws of human nature, mastery, or art of seduction? I was like, Robert, there should just be like a greatest hits album, so this is the greatest hits of Robert Greene, One Meditation Every Day on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature. Great book. Peter Drucker. This is one page a day from the business strategist and management expert, Peter Drucker. My agent actually did this book when he was an editor at HarperCollins.

4:05Ryan Holiday: And the success of this book is what gave me the idea to do my book, The Daily Stoic, which is one page a day of stoic philosophy, the leather edition. And then I also follow it up later with the daily dad which is one page of parenting advice every day this is the parenting dab de jane um it's not one page a day exactly but the idea is it's a parenting meditation you can start each day with it doesn't go it only goes to 80 but you can just start over once you get to 80 if you're running a business you know the deal with most crms they are packed with a bunch of features you're never going to use clunky interfaces and you spend a bunch of time just trying to find the basic info and then you stop using them.

4:46Ryan Holiday: Well, that's where today's sponsor PipeDrive comes in. It's a simple sales CRM tool for small and medium sized businesses. PipeDrive brings your entire sales processes into one dashboard, giving you a crystal clear, complete view of the sales process, as well as customer information. So you stay in control and you can close more deals faster. And it all centers around the visual sales pipeline, where you can see every deal, what stage it's in, and what needs to happen next. Pipedrive is powerful enough to scale with your business, but simple enough that your team can actually use it right now on day one.

5:19Ryan Holiday: Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join over 100 ,000 companies already using Pipedrive. Right now, if you use the link, you'll get a 30-day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head over to pipedrive.com slash stoic to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash stoic, and you can be up and running in minutes. We just got home from a spring break trip, 12 hours of driving, we're pulling into the driveway, and we're like, oh man, what are we gonna have for dinner tonight? What are we gonna have dinner for tomorrow? Because we don't have time to go to the grocery store.

5:49Ryan Holiday: But then we remembered, we had a HelloFresh box delivered while we were gone. We had someone put it in the fridge. That took care of everything because HelloFresh makes cooking effortlessly. You can always look forward to a homemade meal. And with HelloFresh, no two meals will ever be the same. You can choose from 80 plus global recipes every month, Vietnamese, Moroccan, Caribbean, and more. You can try unique ingredients. They're all pre-proportioned for you. You don't have to be a five-star chef to make dinner taste great. The recipes are easy to follow. They don't require fancy equipment. And again, all the ingredients are right there.

6:24Ryan Holiday: Go to hellofresh.com slash stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus a free Nutribullet Ultra. That's their compact kitchen system. It's almost a$200 value on your third box. Free meals applied as a discount on the first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. Must order the third box by May 31st, 2026. Amazing books you can read in a single sitting. So this little book, I loved it so much I bought a thousand copies of it. I think we're one of the only bookstores in the country that has it. This is a little book by Stefan Zweig, who wrote The World of Yesterday. And it's just a short biography of Montaigne.

7:02Ryan Holiday: He's writing as the world is falling apart and he's writing about a guy, Montaigne, who is writing and thinking when his world is falling apart. It is a lovely book that you can read very quickly. The War of Art. This is a book you can read in one sitting and then you should read it again and again and again. I try to read it before I start any creative project. This is the new Walter Isaacson book, the greatest sentence ever written about the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence. On the 250th anniversary of our country. She does a nice, what is this, 70 page or so meditation on a wonderful sentence and what it means.

7:36Ryan Holiday: This is Gift from the Sea by Anne Marle Lindberg. It's a lady walking along a beach riffing on modernity, quietness, stillness, writing on youth, age, love and marriage, peace, solitude, and contentment. She writes this on a brief vacation and it's kind of a vacation of a book to read. I actually read this flying to the beach on vacation on a two-hour flight or so. That's perfect. This one's almost too short to be a book, but it is in fact a book. This is Stockdale's Courage Under Fire. This is a man testing the doctrines of Epictetus in the Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Okay, 21 pages.

8:17Ryan Holiday: So you can do this in less than one sitting. I think you'll like this one now. This is Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These. I'll get one novel in here. This book is 114 pages, but it is incredible. The ending, it's going to fuck you up, but it's very good. 84 Charming Cross Road. Again, this doesn't seem like an amazing book, but it is the series of letters between a screenwriter in the U.S. and an antique bookseller in the U.K. right after World War II, but you will fall in love with all the characters in this book and devour it in one setting. This one is very relevant today. It's written by General Smedley Butler.

8:55Ryan Holiday: This is War is a Racket, the anti-war classic by one of the most decorated Marines in US history. Alright, so this is a letter, 120 pages. This is a letter that Kafka wrote to his father. He had this overbearing, imperious, judgmental father. They never got along. He never understood his son and so one day kafka sits down and he says i'm going to write him a letter just pouring out all my thoughts and emotions and that's what this book is he sends it to his mother who of course never gives it to his father but this to me is a great parenting book it's also a great book if you had difficult parents yourself steal like an artist is great show your work is great keep going is great if you want to be more creative you want to be more inspired you want to do better work you want to build an audience for your work i think these three books are great and they've got you know lovely little drawings and doodles in them too you can definitely read these in one sitting.

9:43Ryan Holiday: This is one of the greatest sports books ever written. I would not have guessed that it was so short. It is exactly 150 pages about the famous match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graibner. Just an incredible, exquisite piece of sports writing and character study and psychology. It's so stuck in my mind and so riveting. I would have guessed it's 250 or 300 pages, but it obviously reads much faster than that. This is The Way of Love by Anthony DeMeo. Not only is it only, it's 190 pages or so, but these are very little pages. If you wanted to put this on a normal size, it's gonna get way smaller.

10:25Ryan Holiday: Basketball coach gave me this book one time and it changed my life. Just absolutely beautiful writing in here. Timothy Snyder's short book on tyranny, very apropos of this moment clocks in at 126 pages. If people could just read these pages, we would be in better shape. Some books that are so good, you'll have trouble believing that they're true, but they are, and they're so well written, they'll rip your face off. Literally, that's true for this one. This is Night of the Grizzlies, which is about a series of grizzly bear attacks that happened on one night in 1967 in Glacier National Park, the first time it had ever happened in the park when you read about the lead-up to it happening you realize it was inevitable like they would have shows where they would feed the bears trash every night and then they let people camp right next to the shows mind-blowing of course the best animal verse man's uh narrative non-fiction book is the tiger by john valant i just can't tell you how good this story is and if you haven't read it i don't know what you're doing with your life i just read marriage at sea which is about this couple sailing from london to new zealand and then halfway through a whale sinks their boat really like Moby Dick which is also what In the Heart of the Sea is about like the true story of Moby Dick but hundreds of years later basically the same thing would happen again and they spend many many days in this inflatable raft they catch turtles and sharks and they somehow manage to survive against all odds it's this sort of interesting look at their marriage that is under strain throughout all of it absolutely incredible The Stranger in the Woods and The Art Thief, both written by the same guy.

12:01Ryan Holiday: This guy steals literally billions of dollars worth of art from tiny museums all across Europe. And then he just keeps them in his apartment until, I won't spoil it, incredible. And then one day, some guy just drives off into the woods in Maine, and then he doesn't come out for 27 years. Everyone knew there was someone who was breaking into their houses and stealing supplies, and there were whispers and rumors of it, but no one saw him. Just absolutely incredible book. This is The Black Count about a black general in Napoleon's army, who also just happened to be the father of Alexander Dumas, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo.

12:36Ryan Holiday: Incredible book. And let's close this out with The River of Doubt about Theodore Roosevelt exploring a river in South America where he almost dies post-presidency. Just mind-blowing. And by the way, he took a copy of Epictetus with him. If you want more book recommendations, I send these out in my reading list newsletter, which I've sent out every month for 15 years. And you can sign up at ryanholiday.net slash reading list.

13:25I mean, the new equipment, it makes it so much more efficient. Sorry, got a little carried away there. Another reason to choose old National Bank? Get old. Member FDIC.