Older But Never Wiser | Ask Daily Stoic

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.

0:55Older but never wiser. There is no wisdom without experience. But experience doesn't necessarily translate into wisdom, does it? We've all met people who refuse to learn life's lessons. We've all met people who remain remarkably naive and immature despite their age. We've all met people who, to borrow an expression Churchill used to describe one of his enemies, when they managed to stumble over truth, pick themselves up, and carry on as if nothing had happened. The ancients believed that suffering led to wisdom, except, of course, when it didn't. And what prevented this acquisition? Inattention, entitlement, complacency, ego.

1:39It's impossible to learn that which you think you already know, Epictetus said. We have two ears and one mouth for a reason, Zeno reminded his students. Procrastination, too, we tell ourselves. We'll get to stuff later. You are an old man, Mark Stereus admonished himself in meditations. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future. Look, it would be wonderful if we could just count on wisdom happening. Unfortunately, like all things worthwhile, it only comes from work. Deliberate, intentional, day-to-day work.

2:20It is, like the other virtues, not a noun, but a verb. It is something you are doing. Wisdom takes work. It always has, and it always will. And that's what the new book is about, right? Wisdom takes work. and it's out in just a few days. I cannot wait for you to read it. I've been working on it for years. If you've gotten anything out of the Daily Stoic email or the Daily Stoic podcast, which we've put out totally for free every day now for nine years, it would mean so much to me if you could support us by pre-ordering it. We've got a bunch of awesome pre-order bonuses to make it extra worth your while, including pages from the manuscript.

3:00And we can all have dinner together and talk about the ideas in the book. I'm really proud of this book. I can't wait for you to read it. As I said, it would mean so much if you could pre-order it. Just a few days left. Go to dailystoic.com slash pre-order to grab a signed and numbered first edition. And it'll be arriving at your house very, very soon. You can also get the audiobook and e-book, of course, all of that at dailystoic.com slash pre-order.

3:31I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school, and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey, because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$149 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound, and they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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5:45Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome back to another Thursday episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. We are officially in the countdown for the release of Wisdom Takes Work. If you're tired of me talking about it, I'm sorry. I have this experience, right? I go all over the world. I give talks and people will come up to me and say things. They'll be like, I get the Daily Stoic every day. And then they're like, and I didn't know that you had a podcast. Or they go, I listen to the podcast every day. And are you ever going to come give a talk here? And I'm like, I gave a talk there a month ago. I thought I was talking about it incessantly on the podcast.

6:25I guess what I'm meaning to say is people don't pay as much attention as you do. So they don't actually find it repetitive. You got to say things a bunch of times for the messages to get through. So I'll say it one more time today. I'll say it many more times. I got to admit. Wisdom Takes Work is out on October 21st. You can pre-order signed and numbered first editions at dailystoic.com slash wisdom. It's the most helpful thing you can do to me, to any author, pre-order their books. It's how publishers decide how many copies to order, determines how many copies bookstores order. It determines whether it hits the bestseller list or not.

6:59It would mean a lot to me. So I put together a bunch of pre-order bonuses to incentivize you to do that dailystoic.com slash wisdom or dailystoic.com slash stoic virtues. If you want all the books in this series, I'll link to all that in today's show notes. As I said, been giving lots of talks. I gave a talk in Austin a couple of weeks ago, doing another one in San Diego. All that's at dailystoiclive.com. Some more dates being added. But before the talk, the Daily Stoic team, Blake and Jordan and Anna asked me some questions that people had put through on Instagram all about wisdom. So I riffed on that before I went on stage just to sort of warm up.

7:39And that's what I'm going to bring you in today's Q &A episode. You can send us questions on Instagram at Daily Stoic or at Ryan Holiday if you have other questions and I will try to answer them. And one of the things we're doing as part of the bonuses is a Q &A. So if you want to ask questions about the book, just pre-order it and you qualify for that. Or if you order a bunch of copies, you can come have dinner with me at The Painted Porch. All of that at dailystoic.com slash wisdom. But let's get into your questions right now.

8:10How would you define wisdom in one sentence? I think the thing about wisdom is that it's difficult to define. And if you think it's easy to define, if you think you have it, you almost certainly don't have it. The whole point of wisdom is that it's a little bit ineffable. And it's also many things, right? It's knowledge and insight and experience and creativity and perspective and intelligence. It's all of these things. I think the one thing we can say very clearly about wisdom is that you're not born with it. You can be born smart, but you can't be born wise. Wisdom is something you earn. Can you lose wisdom?

8:47The great civil rights leader, John Lewis, was a child. His mother told him that one of the most important things was education because once something was in your brain, no one could take it away from you. That's the thing about knowledge. That's the thing about wisdom. You learn it, you do the work, and then it's yours forever. And it can pay dividends forever. You can't exactly lose wisdom, but there are certainly many things that smart people can do to make themselves stupid, right? You can grow egotistical. You can grow complacent. You can become a know-it-all and then it becomes impossible for you to know anything else.

9:22You can have a toxic media diet. You cannot take care of yourself. You cannot sleep. You can get lazy and entitled. And so we often see smart people, seemingly wise people, do very stupid things or rather we see what you might call educated fools. And so wisdom has to be this ongoing thing. It's not something you have. It's something you are getting. It's about becoming wiser. And certainly when you start to think of yourself as wise, your pursuit of wisdom ceases. Is there a difference between knowledge and wisdom? They say that knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is that a tomato doesn't belong in a fruit salad.

10:06So knowledge is one thing. Knowledge is the idea, the information, in some cases the trivia or the fact. It's being exposed to the thing. And then wisdom is, of course, not just understanding what it means, but when it applies, how to apply it. Wisdom is ultimately, I think, in a word, discernment, right? Knowing what's what. And if you don't have that, it doesn't matter how much knowledge or facts you have, you're not going to be able to put them into practice, which is, of course, is the whole point of knowledge. If there's one thing you hope that people get out of reading Wisdom Takes Work, what is it?

10:43Seneca said, the one thing we know for certain is that no one is wise by chance. Wisdom isn't this thing that you're born with. It's not this thing you're entitled to. It's work that you are doing. The title of the book is Wisdom Takes Work. And not just when you're young, not just when you're in school, not just when you're starting out, not just when you're trying to understand or figure out a topic, but always. Wisdom is not just work. It is the work of your life. There's a story about Mark Srelius as an old man seen leaving the palace in Rome and a friend stops him and says, you know, where are you going?

11:15And he says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I do not yet know. The man says, this is amazing. Here we have the wise king of the Romans still taking up his tablets and going to school. So we become a student and then we must stay a student. That's the fundamental idea of wisdom takes work. What's one practical exercise you can do every day to grow wisdom. Seneca says the path to wisdom is pretty simple. It's acquiring one thing a day, one quote, one story, one fact. He says something that fortifies you against poverty, against misfortune, against death. The idea is that you don't ever get it like in an epiphany.

11:57It's not something that gets downloaded in your brain. It's not something you graduate from. It has to be this ongoing commitment every day, a little bit more. And that's actually something that Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, says too. He says, well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. So it's this process. I want you to think of wisdom as an ongoing process, not a thing you have, but a thing that you are going after always.

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