What Would a Year of This Look Like?

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2:15Ryan Holiday: What would a year of this look like? As you know, the Stoics revere four virtues—courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom. But virtue can feel abstract, and the word itself is almost quaint. It's associated sometimes with self-righteous moralizing than with anything practical or powerful. But the ancients understood virtue differently, not as a noun but as a verb. To the Stoics, virtue was a way of life, not something we are, but something we do. Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. We become builders by building, he said, and we become harpists by playing the harp.

3:04Ryan Holiday: Similarly then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions. So what would a year look like if you actually practiced this? What would 2026 look like if it were filled with courage and discipline and justice and wisdom, not as an ideal, but as a habit, a year in which day by day you chose the better action, the right action, the virtuous action. Imagine waking up each day with a clear intention to be braver, to be more in command of yourself, to do the right thing, to do more good for other people, to learn more, to think better, not in some grand heroic way, but in the small consistent choices we make that actually shape a good life.

3:56Ryan Holiday: And that's what we're building the Daily Stoic 2026 New Year New You Challenge around. We always try to build them around a word, and this year the word is virtue, right? How to have a more virtuous 2026. And so it's a set of 21 actionable challenges, one per day for the first 21 days of the year. And they're all built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. I want to help you make 2026 not just be your best year, but your most virtuous year. We're going to tell you exactly what to do, how to do it, why it works, and we'll give you strategies for maintaining these habits and practices, not just for the rest of the year, but for your whole life.

4:38Ryan Holiday: There are things I do day-to-day that I picked up in challenges we did in 2018, 2019, 2020, because excellence isn't this thing that you're born with or you stumble into. It's cultivated. It's about these day-to-day choices, and it's a challenge, and it's not easy. The question is, are you going to be one of these people? And I hope you will be, and I hope you're one of the thousands of Stoics from all over the world that join me, my family, and my friends, all the people here at Daily Stoic doing the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. It's going to be awesome. It's starting on January 1st.

5:12Ryan Holiday: You got to sign up now. Don't procrastinate. Don't start the year by already failing at one of the virtues, which is to say procrastination. That's a lack of self-discipline, right? Get in it now. Sign up now so you know what you're doing on January 1st. I think it's going to be awesome. I can't wait to see it in there. And just a little note, if you want to do this challenge or any of our challenges or courses throughout the rest of the year, I just sign up for Daily Stoic Life as part of this. You get all the challenges for free. So you can sign up there at dailystoiclife.com or just go to dailystoic.com slash challenge to sign up for the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge.

5:50Ryan Holiday: It's going to be awesome. I can't wait to see you in there. And I can't wait for us to start on January 1st. dailystoic.com slash challenge.

6:08Thank you.