It Started Small (Who Would Imagine It Would Make This Far?) | Matt Choi’s Daily Stoic Practice

0:00Ryan Holiday: So I have a bunch of traveling I'm doing through the end of the year on Daily Stoic Live Tour. I just got back from San Diego. I like to stay in the places that I'm staying. I like to book places on Airbnb so I can be like a local. I not only do some of my best writing, but I learn about things that I wouldn't have known otherwise. When I was just in San Diego, I took a walk along the water. I bumped into someone who recognized me and they told me about their favorite local bookstore, which was like two blocks from where I was staying. And I never would have known about it if it wasn't for that encounter.

0:30Ryan Holiday: It was cool to me to think that I have helped facilitate that experience for many, many people coming to Austin over the years. The first house that I bought in Austin when my wife and I first moved here, we would list it on Airbnb. And it helped me make the transition from my corporate life to being a full-time writer. So if you're going to be away, you should maybe think about listing your place on Airbnb. It can be a great way to earn extra cash while you travel. It can offset the cost of your trip or maybe even go towards whatever you're doing next. If you've got travel coming up, check out Airbnb.

1:00Ryan Holiday: Your home might be worth more than you think, and you can find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

1:21Ryan Holiday: At first, there were only a few of them. A small group gathering to hear Zeno teach on the Stoapokile, the painted porch in Athens, around 300 BC. They came to discuss how to live, how to challenge each other, how to become better people. But a porch can only fit so many people. So the ideas traveled. Students became teachers. Books passed from one person to another. In Rome, Panateus shared the philosophy with Scipio and his friends. Cato practiced it in the Senate. Epictetus taught it to his students. Marcus Aurelius brought it to the highest office in the ancient world. Over the centuries, Stoicism's influence grew and receded, but the writings kept finding new readers.

2:13Ryan Holiday: In 2015, when Steve Hanselman and I were working on The Daily Stoic, the Stoicism subreddit had only a few thousand followers. Today it has more than 800 ,000. More than 3 million people follow The Daily Stoic on Instagram. 2 million on YouTube. A million people subscribe to this email. The Daily Stoic has sold more than 3 million copies and is available in 40 languages. How do we get from a few people on a porch to all of this? Well, the whole point of Stoicism is that it's cumulative. Seneca advised his friend Lucilius to take something from his reading each day, to select one thought to be thoroughly digested.

2:54Ryan Holiday: Something that would help him face adversity, handle his fears, live a little bit better. And just as that adds up, so too has, over the century, the number of people discovering Stoicism. Someone passes along a recommendation, someone tells a friend, someone sees a video or a post online. That was the idea behind the Daily Stoic, right? Steve and I wanted to bring these writings together in a kind of survey course of the philosophy that a person can follow every year. You read a page in the morning, you think about it, you take it into your day, and maybe it helps you catch yourself before you lose your temper.

3:28Ryan Holiday: Maybe it reminds you to stop worrying about something not in your control. Maybe it gives you the push to do something you've been avoiding, and then you return to the next page the next morning. And that's how a philosophy becomes a practice. But also this format supercharged the spread of Stoicism. There are probably more people reading the Daily Stoic every day or reading the email or listening to this podcast than all the Stoics who ever existed in history. How cool is that? And, you know, here we are 10 years later and we've gone back and I think we've made the Daily Stoic a lot better. We revisited the book page by page after another decade of reading and writing and translating and practicing Stoicism.

4:09Ryan Holiday: And we added a bunch of quotes that weren't in there the first time. We changed a bunch of the meditations. We added new illustrations. We added some bonus chapters. We just made it better because my understanding of Stoicism is better. The words of the Stoics haven't changed, although, again, we added some new ones. but what it means to me has changed. And I think the result is a much better book. You can grab the Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition in signed and numbered first edition hardcovers, which we have at dailystoic.com slash DS10. We also have a new edition of The Leather Bound. I just recorded the audio book, which you can grab all of that, dailystoic.com slash DS10.

4:47Ryan Holiday: Thank you all for your support of the book, for your support of this email, for your support of this podcast. It means so much. I did not think we would be here 10 years later, but here we are. And that means the world to me.

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6:19Ryan Holiday: And we did. We had a lot of fun. Whatnot is a totally different platform for buying stuff. It is a live shopping app. It's really fun because I think you want to see who's selling you the stuff. You want to see what they have to say about it. Whatnot is where sellers shine and find their people. Repeat customers that come back to see your face instead of just a logo. So, Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. Beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury, fashion, even cookies. Sellers are building real, thriving businesses. Anyone can sell. Your business can be big or small. It can be just starting.

6:52Ryan Holiday: And people selling on Whatnot sell 10 times more than on other marketplaces. Because you're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. Whatnot users spend something like an hour a day on the app. They're not just browsing. They're engaged. They're buying. They're coming back. You go live. you show off products in real time and you turn what you love into real income. Search Whatnot, W-H-A-T-N-O-T in the app store, download and start selling right away.

7:20Ryan Holiday: So somebody told me you read The Daily Stoat. I do. Yeah, and then you post about it all the time. I post it every single day. Yeah. It's funny because I was going to joke with them. I was going to say, Ryan, I'm sure like I've actually might've impacted some sales because people tell me that they don't buy it because I post it every day and they just watch it off my story. But equally, I've gotten many messages of people asking about what it is, and then they end up purchasing and send me pictures. But I've been reading The Daily Stoic for the past three years. How'd you find it? A mentor of mine that lived in Maryland, he first told me about The Daily Stoic and just kind of stoicism, and he's an entrepreneur that I looked up to.

7:52And then I was at a friend's house, and it was on their coffee table. So I was like, these signs. And I just was like, you know what? It was about to be the new year. And I said, you know what? I looked at it because I'm like, oh, it's dated every single day. Yeah. So obviously the concept of like learning just a little bit. I never read in college and high school and I was a poor student. So for me, a lot of the challenge was, can I just read a page a day? Yeah. Where most people are like, I don't have time to read. I can never read. It's like the thought of actually - The least you can do. The least.

8:19And then obviously from there, I built my muscle of reading more and consuming more content. But that was the start of it. I was building my social content at the time. And I just like, I wanted that to be part of like my routine. Yeah. And that just became the first thing I posted on my stories in the morning just because I was like, yo, this is the first thing I do. Like before I brush my teeth, like I journal and then I read the page and it's just like it became a part of it.

8:40Ryan Holiday: You know, it's funny. So the first editions of the Daily Stoic, like it says every page. So typically the way books work is you have the title on every other page. Okay. Like it'll be like title here, title of chapter here. That's like how books tend to work. Well, so the first edition of the Daily Stoic is that every other page had the Daily Stoic. And then I would post pictures of the book and people go, what book is that? So when we read like the second edition of the book, like probably within like two months, I caught it. And now every page says the Daily Stoic on the top because people post it on social media.

9:15Ryan Holiday: And it's it's become part of this thing where they're sharing it. Sure. Maybe some people don't buy it because you can get it for free on Instagram every day. But not really like way more people hear about it for the first time than that. but it's funny like I'll post a picture of it like on Daily Stoic and it'll sit and people what book is that and be like the book from the account that you're following what are you talking so that's the other thing is like if you realize like people aren't paying nearly a close as close attention to you as you think they are so you do you mess up or you know whatever you have this kind of like imposter syndrome or this doubt that's really almost a form of egotism where you think people like care about you way more than they do and really they're just living their lives and like you have to like it it humbles you you know you you go you'll do it and you'll you'll um you'll be talking about something for months and months and months and then people will be like when's your new book coming out you're like i was worried i was talking about it too much and you've not even heard about it you know and so it's funny i don't know i think this is really what helped me with criticism as well it's like i remember when gary used to say this like years back it was like if you actually realize that most people are living their life and that they have so much shit going on that they don't really care that much about you stuttering or a typo in the video or whatever it might be it'll help you get over the hump of caring about what people think yeah because ultimately it's like if if something happened to me tomorrow my flight most people would move on with their life as sad as that might be or sound it's like besides my family and my loved ones like most people as much of a diehard metroid fan someone might be they're gonna have to go on they're gonna have to move on it's no different than kobe bryant who at a larger scale is way more public figure.

10:55And I think that helped me realize, I'm like, I don't have to take this so seriously. And I think so many people do. They're like, oh my God, it has to be perfect. It has to be this. I'm just like, if you actually realize that like, that's actually what's stopping you from actually seeing what you're capable of and your full potential, like you can actually start to unmask that.

11:12Ryan Holiday: I mean, we found that with Daily Socks. So we'll post something, I'll do super well. And you're like, wow, wow, that did like so good. And then like, we found this on accident, like somebody reposted that same piece of content like a month later and it did more views a second time and you're like you thought everyone saw it and you're like not even a fraction of the people who are interested in seeing it saw you know and that's not to say you can be lazy and you don't have to do a good job but it's realizing yeah most people are really busy and when you are you think you're repeating yourself in fact like they didn't hear it the first eight times and the ninth time they were like oh i exactly needed that i get that with daily stoke all the time people go how did you know like because it resonates that's like yeah i wrote it nine years ago but like and and also i wrote 366 things and then scrambled them up that's what order they're in you know what i mean like there's almost zero intentionality about the date yeah whatsoever the same goes for because we daily stoke is also the email right it's like a new email every day those emails mirrored with this at all or it's completely separate so basically so i wrote the book in 2015 it was coming out in 2016 and i just decided i bought dailystoic.com and i said you know what i'm just going to keep it going someday someone will get to the end of the book and they'll be like how do i keep this going and so the daily stoic email is one email every day and i've done that every single day since 2016.

12:39Ryan Holiday: So that's like multiple versions of this book totally for free. But I write them, not in bulk, but I just write them all the time and then they get sent out separately. The team decides like, Hey, you talked about this yesterday. So the right one for today, like there's, but I have no real say over like, Hey, on, you know, June 3rd, it should be this entry that that's just totally random. But then people ascribe a lot of meaning to it. They go, oh how'd you know it's like i wrote it in march i didn't i love that yeah i love that but that's when you know something hits it's like it's for whatever reason how what someone's going through in that season of their life or that day for it just triggers something well we bring things to what we're reading that's why they say you can never step in the same river twice like the river is different but you're different or they go you know when the when the student is ready the teacher appears like nothing changed but you changed.

13:34Ryan Holiday: And so now you heard the thing that you were not hearing all the times that it was in front of you before. Interesting. I love that. So have you become a reader since? Massively. Yeah. It's actually probably one of the things I'm most proud of is that I've now become, I always say it's like, I was such a poor student because like football is my identity. Now I'm like, I'm like a student of life. So I feel like whether it's, it's been the Daily Stoke has been a good start. And then it's been a ton of books from there. And then other entrepreneurs and just people I look up to in the space, but reading and also audio books and like Headway, which is like kind of shortening a lot of these books has become a major component of just like my day-to-day life.

14:12Ryan Holiday: Interesting. Yeah, I mean, we were talking earlier, like there's all these things you can get better at, like you can develop. You think you're not a reader and it's really, you just haven't, you weren't at a place in your life or you didn't. I see this all the time. People thought they hated books, but really they hate reading. Do you know what I mean? Like they're dyslexic or they have like, they're just maybe a bad eyesight or they can't sit still. And then something like audiobooks just opens up this whole world. Or they would have loved reading. They just have never read a book that did anything for them.

14:45Ryan Holiday: And once you have that experience of like a book that changes your life, that's a dragon that you chase over and over again. It's like the first run or like coming back into the gym. Truly.

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