Skip The Shortcut. Take The Long Way Instead.

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1:10Ryan 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.

1:25Ryan Holiday: Skip the shortcut. Take the long way instead. There's a great exchange between Epictetus and a student that encapsulates how the Stoics likely would have felt about artificial intelligence. Tell me what to do, the student says. It would be better to say, Epictetus corrects him, make my mind adaptable to any circumstances. In our fast-paced world, we are constantly bombarded with promises of shortcuts to success, happiness, fulfillment. We're advertised get-rich-quick schemes and productivity hacks on social media, which is itself kind of a shortcut to human connection. And now artificial intelligence presents itself as perhaps the ultimate shortcut, offering to write our emails, draft our essays, create our art, even think and plan for us.

2:13Ryan Holiday: AI promises to do the intellectual heavy lifting while we reap the rewards, suggesting we can bypass the learning process altogether. Marcus Aurelius, despite being emperor of Rome, still made time every day to write in his journal, examining his thoughts and actions. He understood that wisdom required ongoing effort, not once, but continually throughout his life. There's no app, no hack, no shortcut that could replace the necessary inner work. In our modern context, the Stoics would likely view AI and other shortcuts with caution, not because technology itself is the problem, but because the siren song that we can bypass hard work is fundamentally misleading.

2:57Ryan Holiday: The Stoics would remind us that the struggle itself, the very difficulty we try to avoid, is often where the most learning value is created. It's often the very work we're trying to avoid where wisdom lies. Wisdom cannot be outsourced. It cannot be hacked. And it can definitely not be automated. It has to be earned. The slow way, the hard way, the right way. Wisdom takes work. That's what Seneca said. He said, no man is wise without toil. Don't take the shortcut. Take the long way. That's what's going to get you what you want and ultimately get you where you want to go. You can check out Wisdom Takes Work, by the way, which was a lot of work.

3:37Ryan Holiday: It was the culmination of six plus years of writing, many more years of research and thinking before that. And in fact, the whole Virtue series is that. Courage is calling, discipline is destiny, right thing right now. And Wisdom Takes Work, you can grab the whole set, sign them for you. I'll link to that in today's show notes.

4:03Thank you.