For centuries, all sorts of people—generals and politicians, athletes and coaches, writers and leaders—have looked to the teachings of Stoicism to help guide their lives. Each day, author and speaker Ryan Holiday brings you a new lesson about life, inspired by the thoughts and writings of great Stoic thinkers like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca the Younger. Daily Stoic Podcast also features Q+As with listeners and interviews with notable figures from sports, academia, politics, and more. Learn more at DailyStoic.com.
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Still less conceal it, but love it. Nietzsche. At age 67, Thomas Edison returned home early one evening from another day at the laboratory. Shortly after dinner, a man came rushing into his house with urgent news. A fire had broken out at Edison's research and production campus a few miles away. Fire engines from 8 nearby towns rushed to the scene, but they could not contain the blaze. Fueled by the strange chemicals in the various buildings, green and yellow flames shot up 6 7 stories, threatening to destroy the entire empire Edison had spent his life building. Edison calmly but quickly made his way to the fire through the now hundreds of onlookers and devastated employees looking for his son. Go get your mother and all her friends, he told his son with childlike excitement. They'll never see a fire like this again. What? Don't worry, Edison calmed him. It's alright. We've just got rid of a lot of rubbish. That's a pretty amazing reaction. But when you think about it, there really was no other response. What should Edison have done? Wept? Gotten angry? Quit and gone home? What exactly would that have accomplished? You know the answer now. It's nothing. So he didn't waste time indulging himself. To do great things, we need to be able to endure tragedy and setbacks. We've got to love what we do and all that it entails, good and bad. We have to learn to find joy in every single thing that happens. Because there was a little more than rubbish in Edison's buildings, years years of priceless records, prototypes, and research were turned to ash. The buildings, which had been made of what was supposedly fireproof concrete, had been insured for only a fraction of their worth. Thinking that they were immune to such disasters, Edison and
Culturally and as a species. So if you're not responding or articulating, expressing when that iron string gives you something Yeah. Someone else is gonna do it. My other favorite one from Emerson is he has this essay on travel. And although he's someone who travels all the time, he's basically saying, don't travel. Right. Right. He's just like he's like, so many of us bring ruins to ruins. Right. Right? Because we travel as an escape. We don't like where we are. We don't like what's happening, and we think, oh, I'm gonna go to Europe. I'm gonna go to India. I'm gonna backpack. I'm gonna do this. It'll be it'll be good in Hawaii, and it won't be because you're there. You know? Right. Right. And, and and the thing I I love that he points out in that essay that I think about all the time, he goes, the people who built the things that you are going to visit, the things that are so impressive and amazing. He's like, they didn't do that by traveling. They did it by staying where they are doing the work. You know? Yeah. And, again, so in the 1800, you don't think about people as having the ability to just pack up and leave and travel. But, no, they they did, and that that same sort of wanderlust and escapism that's, you know, easier now when you can fly across the world for, you know, a cheap airline ticket. It's also there for him and for for has been for people for all time. Yeah. But he always warned against the exterior life as opposed to the interior life and getting too What's the difference? Well, the interior life is the timeless self, the part of us that's outside of circumstances, outside of conditions. The exterior life is samsara. It's everything that's happening around us. Yeah. The, you know, changing circumstances. And then when we identify too much with those things, whether it's going to Rome or whether it's, you know, some emotional, you know, experience we're having, then we're losing touch with the part of us that's awake. Yeah. And that is deeper than that. And that doesn't depend on changing conditions for our well-being.
There is picked up some good habits and then relapsed. Maybe you waited for things to go back to normal and then went back to the normal ways you used to waste time or medicate yourself. A core practice of stoicism is journaling and what is journaling, but the process of contemplation and self reflection It's putting you and your actions up for review. Take a minute to do that today or more than a minute and don't lie to yourself. Look at your successes. And be proud of them, that you're standing is no small feat. Be grateful for that. Sadly far too many of our fellow humans didn't make it. On March 14th, 2020, just 65 Americans had died of COVID 19. By March 2021, over 500,000 people had perished. Here in 2024 close to 1,200,000 are dead and gone almost 7,000,000 around the world have lost their lives. Others lost jobs or opportunities or experiences they can never get back. We were all affected, but take a second to look at where you were lucky. What you have to be grateful for, what skillful maneuvering and resiliency and random luck allowed you to endure and adapt. Seneca talked about how we pitied the person who never went through anything. The person who has never been knocked down or bled in the ring Well, certainly that's not true for you or any of us anymore. We've been through it. Well, how are we stronger, smarter, and wiser for it? What perspective do we take from it? What are we more confident of? What changes do we still need to make? Now let us learn from these successes and failures, vices, and virtues so that next time and there is always a next time we can be better, better citizens, better people, better stoics. It's been a hell of a couple years. If we don't find a meeting from this suffering, if we don't improve because of it individually and collectively, then we have added harm on top of the misfortune, and that is inexcusable. Hope everyone's doing well. It's just a
