You Can’t Stop Here | with No Blame, Just Focus

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: You can't stop here. When Junius Rusticus handed the future emperor of Rome a book, it came with an implication. A true philosopher, a true leader, Rusticus, and says it could not be satisfied just getting the gist of something. They had to understand it inside and out. None of the lessons that Marcus Rios took from Epictetus, the book that Rusticus gave him in his mid-twenties, would have been possible without first listening to this lesson. He not only inhaled the book, he clearly went over it over and over until it seeped into his very soul. That's why Meditations is filled with quotes from Epictetus.

0:58Ryan Holiday: That's why Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man in the world, managed to stay sane despite the inherent insanity of his position. Now, maybe you've read Epictetus. Maybe you've been meaning to. But chances are you haven't treated it like Marcus did, like Rusticus expected, like Epictetus deserves. In these writings—actually, Epictetus' lectures were recorded by another student named Arian—we have the life experiences of a man who spent 30 years as a slave. We also get his firsthand familiarity with temptation and corruption and vanity, having an owner who worked in Nero's court. What Epictetus learned and went on to teach others was profound and enduring.

1:42Ryan Holiday: He taught that true freedom comes from recognizing what lies beyond our control and focusing only on what is up to us. He came to see that the most powerful empire is ruling over ourselves in living a life of virtue, even in a world of corruption, darkness, or misfortune. Marcus Aurelius was not satisfied just getting the gist of Epictetus' powerful teachings, and you shouldn't be either. You can see it in meditations. The same ideas appear again and again on anger, on difficult people, on dealing with death, on doing his duty when nobody is watching. Not because Marcus had mastered them, but because he hadn't.

2:21Ryan Holiday: He kept returning to Epictetus because the work was never finished. Revert at once to yourself is the note of a man still trying. And that's what Rusticus had given him. Not a book to finish, but a lifelong practice to return to. Now, Marcus was lucky. He was lucky in many ways as the emperor of Rome, but he was also lucky that he had Rusticus as his guide to Epictetus. And we tried to capture some of that in what we're doing this month for Daily Stoke. We're doing a deep dive into Epictetus. And we built, just like we did Mark's realist month a few months ago, we built Epictetus Month. And it's built around our How to Read Epictetus Guide.

3:05Ryan Holiday: All the best wisdom from Epictetus, everything we've learned, hundreds of hours of researching and writing, interviewing experts about Epictetus, distilling, translating his ideas, and I'd love to do this deep dive with you, because if the work changed Marcus's life so much, how might it change ours? I know it changed mine. I'm working on this book now about Stockdale. I know how it changed Stockdale's life. And this month, if you buy the How to Read Epictetus Guide, you can not only get a copy of Epictetus's writings for just a few bucks, you'll also gain access to our online discussion community, where we're going to go through the book and the digital guide together and talk about all Epictetus' guides.

3:48Ryan Holiday: On August 26th, we're doing a deep dive live session about it together. You're going to ask me questions. I'm going to ask you questions. This is going to be awesome. We're going to be talking about Epictetus all month. I'd love to have you join us. I'll link to it in today's show notes. And I hope to see you on August 26th as we're talking about Epictetus.

4:15Ryan Holiday: Running a business means you're always reachable, but of course, it's not really possible as a person to always be reachable. And so the moment you miss that call, that text, that follow-up, a competitor is the one that picks it up. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, Q-U-O, the business phone system built so you never miss an opportunity, so you can actually be always reachable, even if it's not possible for you to literally be always reachable. It is the number one rated business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90 ,000 businesses who rely on it to stay reachable and look professional every day.

4:52Ryan Holiday: All your calls, texts, and voicemails live in one place. So anyone on your team can pick up the conversation, see the full history, and respond fast. And quote, integrates with the tools your team already uses. HubSpot, Zapier, Claude, whatever. And it helps you save time, stay organized, and spend less effort chasing down information between systems. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Daily Stoic. Quo.com slash Daily Stoic. We just got back from this trip to Europe and it was so ungodly hot there.

5:29Ryan Holiday: Like it was the hottest it's ever been, which exacerbated another experience if you've ever been to Europe, just how bad the mattresses are there. So I was excited to be home because we've been gone for a while, but I was really excited to be home and sleep on my eight sleep pod. I missed it every night I was gone. It cools the mattress, cools my wife's side differently than my side. Doesn't matter how hot the room is. The bed is just perfect. Monitors your sleep rate. I was putting my son to bed last night, reading to him, and then I get a little alert on my phone that it was almost time for me to go to bed.

6:07Ryan Holiday: that the 8sleep was doing its thing. Then I woke up this morning, it showed me my sleep score. It monitors your heart rate, your respiratory rate. You can see the difference that having a pod on your mattress makes and their autopilot feature even learns your sleep patterns. It adjusts the temperatures, the elevation, the wake-up time. Pod users report up to 32 % improvement in sleep quality and up to 34 % more deep sleep. You can use my code dailystoic at eightsleep.com slash stoic for up to$350 off, and you get 30 days to try it at home and return it if you don't love it.

6:49Ryan Holiday: No blame, just focus. You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy, or regret. Epictetus' Discourses 3.22. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot, and a small cell, and once a year he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners. And yet, in spite of that, Mandela became a figure of dignity within the prison.

7:35Ryan Holiday: Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander, explained to Frontline, Mandela always made the point, if they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly. That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms. He pretended to jump rope and shadowbox to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance. That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reason choice.

8:09Ryan Holiday: Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional. Get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Reuben Hurricane Carter, a Epictetus, a James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves, the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and feat of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things and I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after, the forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried, the way they brought people together.

8:59Ryan Holiday: They could have come out of the prison-like Bane in Batman, right? It could have been the origin of a villain story, right? But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things, you think of Gandhi, you think of how unjustly they were treated, how how people took things from them, years that they would never get back, time with their family they would never get back, broke down their bodies in the way that Epictetus experienced under torture or Stockdale experienced under torture. You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life.

9:35Ryan Holiday: They were deprived of so much, but they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison.

9:48Ryan Holiday: He He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stoic virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage, their, this is who I am. You cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of stoicism. I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way. And I hope Soctus is the only one who tests Epictetus's theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, we have a period in a marriage or we have a bad boss, or maybe is how you think about the pandemic. We have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like.

10:31Ryan Holiday: And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger or resentment or envy or regret, as Epictetus says. But we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Mark Stavili says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do.

11:18This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Every day as a small business owner feels like solving a puzzle. One moment you're cruising along, and the next, there's a shipping snag that has you scrambling. But here's a surprise you will like. With Progressive, small business owners save 13 % on their commercial auto insurance when they pay in full.

11:56So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as 8 minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Discounts not available in all states or situations.