Let Us Fulfill Our Obligation | with 10,000 Pages That Will Change Your Life

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

0:56Let us fulfill our obligation. That nice, warm feeling you're carrying over from Thanksgiving, that fullness after your big family get-together, from the meal, from the company, from all of it, It's important that you realize that not everyone is feeling that right now. In fact, many people are experiencing the exact opposite. More than 47 million people in America face hunger. Nearly 14 million children. That's one in five. One in five. Tragic and it's also unacceptable and preventable. Add to that the recent government shutdown, federal cuts to programs that help food insecure families, an interruption of SNAP benefits.

1:42And it's not hard to understand why people in need of food assistance are there and why their numbers have gone way up. Maybe you're thinking, well, what can I do about it? How could I possibly help? Isn't stoicism about focusing on what's in my control? How could I personally do anything about this insurmountable problem? Well, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, those suffering humans are us and we are them. To allow harm to come to them through indifference, through callousness, through despair, is to allow harm to come to ourselves. It's why the most magnificent moment of Marcus Aurelius' reign was not when he conquered some foreign power, but instead the day he decided to sell off the palace furnishings to keep Rome going during the Antonine Plague.

2:30He did it to help those in need. Hierocles was a Roman Stoic who spoke of our circles of concern. Our first concern, he said, was our mind, but beyond this was concern for our bodies, for our family, then our extended family. Like concentric rings, these circles were followed by our concern for our community, our city, our country, our empire, our world. The work of philosophy, though, he said, was to draw this outer concern inward, to learn how to care as much as possible for as many people as possible, to do as much good for them as possible. This was our obligation, the Stoics believed. It was our duty to help others, to serve others, to illustrate the virtues of courage and justice towards and for and through others.

3:15So today, when some people might go line up to get a deal on an absurdly large TV or gorge themselves on leftovers or spend hours shopping sales online, fine, let us decide, let us try to put some of our energy towards helping the less fortunate. Let's help people from going hungry. Let's alleviate someone else's worry and fear. Let us put food on their table. Better yet, let's do it together, which is what we have been doing here at Daily Stoic for the last several years. Once again, we're teaming up with Feeding America to help families who are hungry. And last year, me, you, all of us came together and we raised close to$250 ,000 together, which provided 2.4 million meals.

4:00And this year, we're trying to get to our goal of 300 ,000, which would provide 3 million meals for families across the country. Daily Stoic put up the first 10 % of the goal already. We're chugging away. I think we're going to break 100 ,000 easy today. And then hopefully we'll get there to the whole 300 ,000, but we can't do it without you. So you can head over to dailystoic.com slash feeding to donate and learn more. And I think together, we can all make a small dent in a very big problem. We can't alleviate everyone's suffering or struggle, but for the people we do help, that difference, well, it makes a difference.

4:36So let's do it. Let's be good Stoics today and we can fulfill our obligation together. As I said, that's dailystoic.com slash feeding. Now, if you live outside the US, you can check out Action Against Hunger. It's a global humanitarian organization that fights against hunger across nearly 50 countries. I'll link to that in today's show notes or just Google Action Against Hunger. Or just go down to your local food bank and donate something. But the point is, do something for someone else. That's how you should celebrate Black Friday. And be well.

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6:33Stoic at checkout. That's human with two N's, dot com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code Stoic at checkout. Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Vastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns.

7:13There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in. We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour.

7:51And of course, this is stoicism too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you. Discover your uncharted territory. Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours.

8:17Today, I'm going to give you 10 ,000 pages that will change your life. These are some of the best, but also some of the longest and biggest books ever written, but they are worth it, I promise you. All right, let's get into it. Here we have the collected works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. My favorite Emerson essay is, of course, Self-Reliance, but I also love his one on compensation. He has this very stoic idea that everything that happens in life has its compensation. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to learn from it? What's it going to demand from us? But of course, famously, as he says, nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of your principles.

8:56If you haven't read Emerson, I don't know what you are doing. Let's not only give Emerson a read, but let's read past just self-reliance. Of course, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is the shortest one on the list, but it is the most remarkable, the private thoughts of the most powerful man in the world. Here we have Atlas Shrugged clocking in at a measly 1 ,200 pages. You should read them and then you should grow the fuck up and not be an Ayn Randian. These are ideas that appeal to the ego, that appeal to the selfish part of us. There are some interesting insights for sure, but I think Ayn Rand is someone you read and then you grow out of.

9:37This is a wonderful biography. We think of Gandhi mostly in India, but we forget that he invents his principles of nonviolence. He comes of age as a political strategist, as a lawyer in India. So this is all about Gandhi before he becomes Gandhi as we know him. There's a great line about him in this book that Gandhi goes to Britain, he becomes a lawyer, and then he goes to South Africa to become the Mahatma. And this is where he's introduced to Tolstoy. This is an amazing book, absolutely one of my all-time favorites. You read the Odyssey because the Odyssey is the key to not just understanding difficulties and trials and the ups and downs of life, which Odysseus of course goes to, but is also the key by which you unlock most of the metaphors, analogies, ideas, plot points, the hero's journey that is so pivotal to all of the rest of Western literature.

10:34The Stoics believed you needed to have read both the Odyssey and the Iliad because they were the key to understanding what Stoic philosophy was all about. Another book about the ancient Greeks. This is Steven Pressfield's The Gates of Fire, which is one of my all-time favorite novels. I have the mass market paperback here. So we'll call it here at 450 or so pages. Just a masterpiece. You should definitely read it. Robert Caro. I have two Robert Caro selections here. So we have The Power Broker, which is a riveting book about the New York City Parks Commissioner, maybe one of the greatest builders and political tacticians of all time.

11:16This book is 1 ,200 or so pages. You'd think it would be boring. Every single page is riveting. It's kind of a mirror of Breaking Bad. Like here you have someone attracted to power, driven by power, but also driven by idealism and principles and making a difference at the beginning. And yet something changes in him as he accumulates more and more power. And yet also it is an insight into how we get things done. People who want to do good things need to read this book. People who want to not do bad things need to read this book. Robert Caro is one of the greatest biographers to ever live. And the series on Lyndon Johnson is the next one.

11:57This is one of the books in this series. I've read all of them. This one's 880 pages. They're all about this length. He hasn't even gotten to Vietnam yet. But hopefully he will finish it in time. If these are the only books you ever read in your life about history, power, politics, you would probably have a better understanding than 99 % of the population. But it's not the only thing you should read. You should also read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln. We see Abraham Lincoln kind of like we do Gandhi as this saint, a man who came out this way fully formed. Of course, it wasn't.

12:33It was an evolution. And he was a politician. He was just an effective politician. He was a politician who had principles. And this is largely about Lincoln during the Civil War, the cabinet he selects, many of which were people who thought they were better than him, people who he disagreed with, people who wanted his job. And yet Lincoln was not only able to save the country, he was able to save the country and make this unwieldy cabinet work. It's one of the great feats of leadership of all time. You should absolutely read this book if you haven't seen the movie Lincoln. it is based on this book, Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton.

13:10Lin-Manuel Miranda reads this book on vacation as a young up-and-coming songwriter and playwright, and he immediately sees in it what most people had missed, what Ron Chernow famously was able to see. Alexander Hamilton has one of the most incredible and most American lives you could possibly imagine. How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore, become a founding father. This is an absolutely incredible book and in many ways a cautionary tale because as brilliant and talented and inspiring as Alexander Hamilton was, his passions, as the Stoics would have said, his ambition, his drive, his lack of emotional control, his lack of control of himself ultimately leads to his downfall.

13:52There are so many cautionary tales and lessons in here. I read this book in hardcover and then I listened to it in audiobook with my son who's obsessed with the Hamilton musical. It is as good as the play. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabella Wilkerson's book on the great migration. History is not supposed to make you feel good. It's supposed to challenge you. It's supposed to challenge your assumptions. Why do Black Americans live in the cities that they live in? What happened during the Jim Crow era? Where did those people go? That's what The Warmth of Other Suns is all about. This reads almost like a giant Russian novel, but it's about America and it's about generations of Americans fleeing for a better life, but not coming from overseas to America, but coming from the deep South to Chicago and California and New York and what they learned, what they overcame, how it changed them and how they changed the country.

14:45Absolutely love this book. If you've read my book, Discipline is Destiny, I've done a lot about Queen Elizabeth that the second I think is one of the most incredible figures of the 20th century. The world literally remakes itself in her reign. Half the countries on earth when she died did not exist when she was born or vice versa. I forget. The point is she lived an incredible life and the arc of most of the 20th century and interacted with most incredible people of the 20th century. I am fascinated by the role of the queen or the British monarch because they are both invested with an incredible amount of symbolism and authority and yet they have very little power.

15:22Yet much is expected of them. It seems like it would be an easy job. You see in this book that it was actually an incredibly difficult job and it required an incredible amount of restraint and discipline to be able to do it well, which she did for basically longer than anyone. She met literally millions of people. She gave hundreds of thousands of speeches. She gave out hundreds of thousands of awards. She traveled millions of miles all over the world. Incredible and fascinating book. This book here is one of the most incredible stories in the history of publishing. How does one of America's greatest generals, one of its greatest presidents, end up losing everything?

16:03A crooked Wall Street operator steals all of his money. He's dying of cancer, and he's looking at leaving his family nothing. I'm talking about, of course, Ulysses S. Grant. Ulysses S. Grant is on the verge of death. And Mark Twain, who hated what publishers had done to him, approaches him with effectively a self-publishing deal. They work out a publishing venture and Grant rushes to finish these memoirs. He dies just a few days after they finish. And then they go on to be one of the best-selling memoirs in American history. And I would say one of the best memoirs in American history. It is the arc of an incredible American life.

16:39Graduates from West Point, a hero of the Mexican-American War. But then he plunges into alcoholism. and he makes a number of mistakes, he ends up selling firewood by the side of the road. And yet within a few years, he's not just a general back in the Union Army, but he is leading the Union cause to victory in the Civil War. He has a strategic vision, a determination, a perseverance that makes him the right man at the right moment. He and Lincoln managed to triumph over the Confederacy. And then afterwards, he writes this incredible memoir about his incredible life, which was filled with tragedy.

17:15and triumphs alike, but it is a brilliant, beautiful book that every American should read. Big epic novel, lots of stoic themes, but it's a novel about human nature. It's a novel about stoicism. It's a novel about race. It's a novel about American history. It's a novel about California. It's a novel about many, many things. It's one of my absolute favorite books. Actually, I like this book so much that I read the book that Steinbeck wrote about writing this book. It's called Journal of a Novel. This is just one of the great novels of all time. You should read it and then reread it because you take something new out of it each time.

17:50A lot of people not that interested in Queen Elizabeth II, I get it. Queen Victoria has an even less attractive reputation, but equally worthy of an incredible book. She lived an incredible life through incredible times and was actually a great ruler. Most of the big biographies that I recommend were written by men, but Julia Barrett does Queen Victoria, an incredible service. It's also about her husband. Just a fascinating book. I loved this. I used it a lot actually when I was writing Stillness is the Key. This book reads like a novel about an incredible life. Absolutely amazing. What do all of these writers have in common?

18:27They were masters, masters of their craft. And then the person they were writing about was a master of something, which is why I will give you this book, which compared to some of these others seems short, but it's still almost 400 pages. This is Robert Greene's Mastery. I was a research assistant on this book, which was the treat of my life, taught me a lot. Robert also published a thousand page transcript. I believe you can get it for free on Amazon of all of the masters he interviewed. So that gets us well above 10 ,000 pages on these books. If you haven't read them, you are missing out. Should you read all of them?

19:01Yes. Can you go wrong by picking any one or a couple of them? No, you cannot. Read all of these books and all 10 ,000 pages. is masters writing about masters. Read these. I read a lot. It's sort of my job. You can't write without reading. But for almost 15 years now, once a month, I send out an email with my favorite book recommendations for that month. Books that I've been reading, books that I've been going through, books that changed my life, that inspired me, that I think connect to what's happening in the world. And you could sign up right now at ryanholiday.net slash reading list.

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