Is It Even Possible To Be Happy?

0:00Ryan Holiday: This year is going to be the 10-year anniversary, not just of the Daily Stoic book, but dailystoic.com. The email, the podcast, all that stuff. And I don't think we would be standing here 10 years later if it weren't for Shopify. Shopify has been the back end of so many things we've done, from the New Year New You challenges to the medallions to posters. Even right now, if you're going to buy a signed book from me, you're going to be checking out through Shopify at dailystoic.com. or if you're buying something from Daily Dad there, or if you come to the Painted Porch, we even use Shopify at point of sale in the store.

0:33Ryan Holiday: And if you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to make that happen. You've got everything you need to start selling and Shopify handles the setup and the checkout and you can focus on growing the business and they've got all the tools to help you with what you need, which is why Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to small businesses just getting started like Daily Stoic was not that long ago. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and real business, so go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash stoic.

1:04Ryan Holiday: That's shopify.com slash stoic to start your free trial. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:22Ryan Holiday: Is it even possible to be happy? A master does not actually master anything. Ask any great athlete, musician, chef, writer, surgeon, teacher, coach, comedian, and they'll tell you they're not done improving, because that's what a craft is, something you spend your whole life getting a little bit better at. And the Stoics understood this, that the highest level one could attain, they said, was the sage, a level they said that you don't actually reach, you just make progress towards. Aristotle said this about virtue, that you can become endlessly more wise, courageous, just, and disciplined, just as you can keep getting better at any skill or profession.

2:04Ryan Holiday: And when we were talking about this on the podcast a little while back with Harvard professor and happiness researcher Arthur Brooks, he actually put happiness in the same category.

2:15Arthur Brooks: I started off doing this work years ago saying, I want to find the secret to happiness. and that's wrong because you can't be happy. What you can be is happier, which is an Aristotelian notion as opposed to a Platonic notion. You can get happier. And the goal is putting yourself, your life on a jagged, messy path toward happiness.

2:38Ryan Holiday: Epictetus said something similar that he was riffing on Socrates when he said, just as one person delights in improving his farm and another his horse, I delight in attending to my own improvement day by day. That's the path to a good life, getting a little better every day, a little more skilled, a little wiser, a little kinder, a little gentler, more disciplined, a little happier. You don't think of these things as something you arrive at in a flash of insight or something, the finish line. No, they are things you accumulate day by day, action by action, as Marcus Aurelius put it, over the course of a lifetime.

3:21Ryan Holiday: In fact, it was Zeno who said that well-being is realized by small steps, but it is no small thing. We actually just relaunched our challenge built around this very idea, the Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge. It's a step-by-step guide for helping you make some daily incremental changes that have long-term positive impact. Six weeks of challenges. Like we are going to challenge you. We're going to push you to get outside your comfort zone. But the point is to make you better, to make your life better, to get you closer day by day, to being happier, to being the person you want to be, to be the person you know you can be.

4:05Ryan Holiday: And you can start on that path today. I'd love to have you join us in the Daily Stoic Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness Challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash habits. And if you join us in Daily Stoic Life, you get this challenge and all our challenges for free. So I will see you there.