This is The Most Valuable Thing | No One Said It'd Be Easy

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: This is the most valuable thing. There are all the things that wealthy people buy with their money. They buy nice cars and enormous homes. They stay in luxury hotels and fly on private aircraft. They accessorize with jewels in high fashion. They pay for access. They hire help. But there is one thing they cannot buy that indeed no one can buy. Contentment. It is interesting that for all the conspicuous consumption and competition between rich people, one thing that is rare amongst them is equanimity, what the Stoics would have referred to as a good and well-ordered life, or as the song we've been riffing on lately puts it, a satisfied mind.

0:57Ryan Holiday: Epictetus, an enslaved man, had it. Nero, the emperor, did not. Seneca, both a philosopher and an incredibly ambitious man, struggled after it, ultimately finding that his power and money were hindrances in achieving it, much like the proverbial camel through the eye of the needle. If the rich cannot seem to possess this, does that not give us a sense of the value of this elusive state, this equanimity, it is literally priceless. You cannot buy it. You can only earn it. And you can only earn it by doing very difficult work. You do it by your daily reading and reflection. You do it by having hard conversations.

1:37Ryan Holiday: You do it by pushing yourself physically, by questioning desires and passions. You do it by zooming out. You do it by questioning assumptions. You do it through the training and practice of virtue. You cannot inherit it. You cannot have a personal shopper pick it out for you. You cannot get it through your Ivy League tuition. It is both much cheaper and more expensive than that. But again, in the end, it's the most valuable thing in the world.

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5:22Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. I hope you had a good 4th of July. Let me read you a little entry from Seneca's Letters 76. No one said it would be easy. Good people, Seneca writes, will do what they find honorable to do, even if it requires hard work. They'll do it even if it causes them injury. They'll do it even if it will bring danger. Again, they won't do what they find base, even if it brings wealth, pleasure, or power. Nothing will deter them from what is honorable, and nothing will lure them from what is base. If doing good was easy, everyone would do it. And if doing bad wasn't tempting or attractive, nobody would do it.

5:57Ryan Holiday: The same goes for your duty. If anyone could do it, it would have been assigned to someone else, but instead was assigned to you. And thankfully, you are not like everyone. You are not afraid of doing what is hard. You can resist superficially attractive rewards. I gave a talk a couple weeks ago and something I said, I was talking about how sort of hard the industry had been ravaged that these folks were in. And I talked about the last couple of years and how hard it had been. And I said, it's good. It's good that it's hard. Look, if everyone could do this thing, selling a house or assessing risk for insurance, if it's beating the market, if it's delivering things from across the world, like if everyone could do the thing, everyone would do it.

6:38Ryan Holiday: Right. And the fact that it's hard is what creates the margins of a business. Like, do I wish writing books was easier? Sure. But if it was easier, I'd have more competition. The fact that it's hard, that it's a battle against yourself and it's a battle against all these other things, that's what deters people. That's what makes doing it worthwhile, not just like creates meaning and fulfillment in it, but it's what makes it success like lucrative in that sense. Again, if everyone could do it, it would whittle everything down until it's a commodity, until it's replaceable, until everyone has it, right?

7:11Ryan Holiday: It becomes generic. So it's good that it's hard, but that doesn't mean that it's not hard. It is hard. And no one said it would be easy. I am thinking of something else, though, as I'm thinking about this Seneca quote. Somewhere else he says something like, think about all the risks and the hard things people will do to be a little bit more famous, a little bit more important, make a little bit more money. whatever. And then think about the excuses we make for why we don't have time to read or like why we can't do these other more virtuous things, right? We're willing to bear incredible burdens, force our way through intense adversity when there's something financially in it for us.

7:52Ryan Holiday: But being a good person or improving in other ways, you know, then we say it's hard or then we make excuses, then we don't do it. And I think that's interesting too, right? Again, it's supposed to be hard. It's going to be hard. It's not going to be easy. But this is what makes it special. Like, look, if everyone was honest and principled, Cato wouldn't impress us as a politician. If power didn't corrupt, Marcus Aurelius being a philosopher king, who gives a shit, right? It's hard. But because it's hard, it becomes rare. And because it's rare, it is valuable. And that's just something I try to tell myself working on this book right now.

8:29Ryan Holiday: It's good that it's hard or someone else would have written this book, right? It's good nobody else saw the potential in this thing or they would have gotten there first. It's good that it's hard. Nobody said it'd be easy. It's good that it's hard, provided you do it anyway. Hey there, just a heads up, I'm going to be on tour this fall. You can see me in Australia and New Zealand in October, in August. I'm mixing my months up here, but in August, you can see me in Chicago and Minneapolis Minneapolis and Detroit. Then I'll be on the East Coast sometime in November and December. Anyways, grab tickets to that, dailystoiclive.com.

9:07Ryan Holiday: I hope to see you there.

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