It’s Scary…But In A Good Way

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: Change is hard. That's why we avoid it. It's easier when things stay the same, when we have familiar ways and routines, our morning coffee, our job, the way we learned it, where no news is good news. Change, on the other hand, requires adjustment. It requires acceptance. It requires us to change. So naturally, yeah, we avoid it. We fear it. But as Marcus Aurelius points out to those of us who are frightened by change, nothing could exist without it. And you know what else change is? It's growth. Or at least it is the opportunity for growth. Without change, we stagnate. Our minds grow complacent.

0:59Ryan Holiday: ignorant to new ideas. Our bodies grow weak from disuse. We remain stuck. We lack clarity. We as part of the world, part of nature, part of the logos need to change in order to maintain our well-being. With the new cycle of spring of regrowth and renewal finally upon us, it is time to change. It's time to listen to the rhythm of the seasons, to begin afresh, to grow back stronger than before.

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4:08Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome back to the Daily Stoic Podcast. It was like 84 on Friday here in Austin, and then it was rainy. and wet and cold all weekend as I'm recording it now. I've got a sweatshirt on and got muddy boots by the back door. In Austin, we have something called false fall and false spring. It's hard to know exactly the transitions of the seasons. We have some false starts. But even to be there, right, even to be here where the clocks have just changed is a reminder that time is flying, right? there's not that much left of winter and spring is basically right here i was in phoenix i was just finishing up that run of four dates and by the way we also just announced five more dates in the u.s and five in new zealand and australia you can grab tickets for that at dailystoiclive.com i hope to see you i think san francisco and portland i think there's minneapolis detroit Wait, I'm forgetting some of the others.

5:10Ryan Holiday: Where have we got? We've got Sydney, Auckland, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth. They're all there. DailyStokeLive.com if you want those dates. But anyways, while I was in Phoenix, I guess this would have been two weeks ago by the time you're hearing this. And that was one of the things that I talked about with them. I'll just play that, right? Because if you're anything like me or them, you had a rough go of it the last couple of months. What a calm and normal and not at all alarming or incredibly long and scary winter it has been. Certainly no need for anything like stoicism, focusing on what you control, not losing your mind, making sense of chaos, resiliency, turning obstacles upside down.

5:58No need for any of that. Of course, that's what the ancient world was, too. I think sometimes we think, oh, it was simpler back then. It would have been simpler times. They lived in exactly the same type of stuff that we're experiencing now. Those problems, they have difficulties. They lived in the future. They just didn't have that. Everything else, though. Everything else. It's always been like this, I guess, what I'm saying, which is what stoicism is there for. Although it does feel like it's been extra crazy lately. You know, there's been crazy news, crazy people, crazy weather. We had this storm in Texas and temperatures dropped way down, and then it rained a bunch, so just everything froze.

6:46Kids couldn't go to school. We had to shut down the bookstore. People's pipes froze. It was really bad. Like, if you have a heart, I think the only thing you can think in moments like that is, fuck ice, right? Right?

7:04I mean, I'm not an expert in this advice. We're just going to have to abolish it. You just can't reform ice like that.

7:14Sorry, that's neither here nor there. But no, just a few months ago, we were thinking about our resolutions, right? What do we want to start doing in the new year? What we're going to stop doing in the new year? What kind of new person did we want to be in the new year? And I think it's worth thinking about, like here, almost all the way through the first quarter of that year. Like, how did you do? Did you start doing the stuff you said you were going to start doing? Did you stop doing the stuff you were going to stop doing? Did you make those changes? Did you start those habits? How are you doing it?

7:52Or did you get rattled? Did you get distracted? Did you get sort of thrown off the path? Like, in my family, I spent the entire month of January sick with one strain of flu after another, and one kid getting it after another, and just watched it go like waves through the whole house. And so, you know, that happens. That is a timeless thing, right? We have our plans, we have our expectations, we have what we want to do, we have what we know we're supposed to do, and then, you know, life says, I don't think so, right? And as I said, this is true in the ancient world. One of the best quotes in meditation, This is Mark's Relius 6, 11.

8:34This is what he says. He says, when jarred unavoidably by circumstances, and I think that word unavoidably is key. When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, you have to revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you can keep going back to it. So stoicism isn't like perfection or even consistency. because we're all human beings and therefore inconsistent and imperfect. Stoicism is the ability to get back to it as quickly as you can, to reset, to level set, to restore, to repair. I feel like every milestone in the year is a chance to do that.

9:20The seasons are changing. How do we change? The clocks are springing forward. How do we spring forward? That's actually something we've done with the Stoic for the last several years. like to do a challenge in 10 years and then we just take for granted a good chunk of us, myself included, have already screwed up by March and so we do, at the end of March, we do like 10 days of stoic challenges about sort of cleaning up the junk that's already accumulated in just those couple months and so as you get those opportunities, you want to take them and that's sort of what I wanted to talk about tonight, like how do we use this as an opportunity having been jarred, having been thrown off, having been distracted or rattled a little bit?

10:03How do we get back to it? Because it's too early to give up on 2026, even though it feels like this is the longest year ever. It's too early to give up on 2026. We don't know what the rest of the year has in store for us. Maybe it'll be calm and chill from here on out. Probably not, though. it never is we can say for certain though that what is ahead is uncertain and it's probably not going to take our preferences into account and so it's a good chance then to take stock of ourselves to get back to those first principles to get back on track, right, a reset a return to the rhythm and for the stoics those four principles The core best practices would be the cardinal virtues.

10:53And I thought we could talk about that tonight. Courage, discipline, justice, wisdom.

10:59Ryan Holiday: And look, if you're looking for a spring reset, if you want to renew, if you want to refocus, if you want to get back to the rhythm, as Marcus Aurelius talks about, well, I think you would love this challenge. It's going to be awesome. I'd love to see you in there. We've got a special offer for podcast listeners. 20 % off when you use code DSPOD20 at checkout. You can join me and thousands of other Stoics in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Just head over to dailystoic.com slash spring and enter code DSPOD20 to get 20 % off.

11:40Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

12:17Thank you.