The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman
The Daily Stoic, 365 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living is a book meant to be read one whole year, one page a day.
It is split in 3 parts, each bulding on top of the previous:
- The discipline of perception
- The discipline of action
- the discipline of will
Control your perceptions.
Direct your actions properly.
Willingly accept what’s outside your control.
My opinion about the book
This is a book meant to be re-read many times as each time you will notice completely different bits. In my first read-through, I got the most out of the first part about perception and the least from the last part about will.
It sheds a light on what is stoicism and the beauty of this thought of mind. It make me want to explore other schools of thoughts.
After this book I’ve left with a feeling that stoicism really teaches pure wisdom. To separate what’s in your control and direct your actions according to the reality of a situation. Their teach being mindful, calm and aware.
My opinion about stoicim before the book was based on “common knowledge” that they are strict, disallow emotion. Like concrete. That is not true. They are wise and have a high moral stance.
Quotes
People are depending on you. Your purpose is to help us render this great work together. And we’re waiting and excited for you to show up.
Perception
Some things are in our control, while others are not. We control our opinion, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word, everything of our own doing.
The source of anxiety
The anxious father, worried about his children. What does he want? A world that is always safe. A nervous investor? That the market will turn around and an investment will pay off.
All of them hold the same thing in common. As Epictetus says, it’s wanting something outside our control.
Conditional happiness is not reachable. You can walk for miles and miles and you won’t get any closer.
It’s quite impossible to unite happiness with a yearning for what we don’t have. Happiness has all that it wants, and resembling the well fed, there shouldn’t be hunger or thirst.
I’ll be happy when I graduate… I’ll be happy when I get this promotion…
On doing things because you “have to”
Take an inventory of your obligations from time to time. How many of these are self-imposed? How many of them are truly necessary? Are you as free as you think?
Reframe failure
our loss might be someone else’s gain.
The present is all we posess
Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present.
/Bil Keane
Study, yes, but go live your life as well. It’s the only way you actually understand what any of it means.
Expect to change your opinion
We’re not as smart and as wise as we’d like to think we are. If we ever do want to become wise, it comes from the questioning and from humility - not, as many would like to think, from certainty, mistrust, and arrogance.
Opinions. Everyone’s got one.
Let’s try weeding (ekkoptein, cutting or knocking out) them out of our lives so that things simply are. Not good or bad, not colored with opinion or judgment Just are.
Be willing to learn from anyone and everyone, regardless of their station in life.
Don’t let your attention slide
Attention is a habit, and letting your attention slip and wander builds bad habits and enables mistakes.
You’ll never complete all your tasks if you allow yourself to be distracted with every tiny interruption. Your attention is one of your most critical resources. Don’t squander it!
Know your character (personal branding!)
If you know what you believe and why you believe it, you’ll avoid poisonous relationships, toxic jobs, fair weather friends, and any number of ills that afflict people who haven’t thought through their deepest concerns.
Action
Observe those whom you praise without prejudice. The just or the unjust? The just. The even-tempered or the undisciplined? The even-tempered. The self-controlled or the uncontrolled? The self-controlled. In makinf yourself that kind of person, you will become beautiful.
/Epictetus
How to have a good day:
Do good things.
Carpe diem
Let us therefore set out whole-heartedly, leaving aside our many distractions and exert ourselves in this single purpose, before we realize too late the swift and unstoppable flight of time and are left behind. As each day arises, welcome it as the very best day of all, and make it your own possession. We must seize what flees.
/Seneca
We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act but a habit.
/Aristotle
… Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind.
/Marcus Aurelius
Review your actions of the last week and plans for the next. The person you’d like to be, or the person you see yourself as - how closely do your actions actually correspond to her? Which fire are you fueling? Which person are you becoming?
Making happiness dependent on accomplishing certain goals is out of your control. It’s an insane risk.
We should take pleasure from our actions - in taking the right actions ranther than the results that come from them.
Our ambition should not be to win, then, but to play with our full effort.
Stop caring what people think
Don’t spend much time thinking about what other people think. Think about what you think. Think instead about the results, about the impact, about whether it is the right thing to do.
Sweat the small stuff
One does not magically get one’s act together - it is a matter of many individual choices. It’s a matter of getting up at the right time, making your bed, resisting shortcuts, investing in yourself, doing your work. And make no mistake: while the individual action is small, its cumulative impact is not.
When at the botom, don’t make things worse
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Whatever happens, don’t add angry or negative emotions to the equation. Don’t react for the sake of reacting. Leave it as it is. Then plan your way out.
Why do the wise have so few problems compared with the rest of us?
- they manage expectations as much as possible
- they always consider both the best and worst case scenarios
- they act with a reverse clause - meaning that they not only consider what might go wrong, but they are prepared for that to be exactly wehat they want to happen.
Take a walk
Today, make sure you take a walk. And in the future, when you get stressed or overwhelmed, take a walk. When you have a tough problem to solve or a decision to make, take a walk. When you want to be creative, take a walk. When you need to get some aire, take a walk. When you have a phone call to make, take a walk. When you need some exercise, take a long walk. When you have a meeting or a friend over, take a walk together.
Virtue practice
Turn obstacles upside down - take one negative circumstance and use it as an opportunity to practice an unintended virtue or form of excellence.
If something prevents you from getting to your destination on time, then this is a chance to practice patience.
turn HAVE TO into GET TO
The task of a philosopher: we should bring our will into harmony with whatever happens, so that nothing happens against our will and nothing that we wish for fails to happen.
/Epictetus
Need some motivation to get out of morning? Here you go:
People are depending on you. Your purpose is to help us render this great work together. And we’re waiting and excited for you to show up.
Nothing is noble if it’s done unwillingly or under compulsion. Every noble deed is voluntary.
/Seneca
Workaholics always make excuses for their selfishness
You are a human being, not a human doing.
Work is what horses die of. Everybody should know that.
/Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
This is as good as any other moment:
We tell ourselves that we need the right setup before we finally buckle down and get serious. Or we tell ourselves that some vacation or time alone will be good for a relantionship or an ailment. This is self-deceit at its finest.
Stoics don’t say “Stop doing this, it’s a sin.” Instead they say “Don’t do this because it will make you miserable.”
Their methods of persuasion hew the line in The 48 Laws of Power: “Appeal to People’s Self-Interest Never to Their Mercy or Gratitude.”
Respect the past, but be open to the future
Traditions are often time-tested best practices for doing something. But remember that today’s conservative ideas were once controversial, cutting-edge, and innovative. This is why we can’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas.
Will
The Inner Citadel
Inner Citadel is the fortress that protects our soul. Though we might be physically vulnerable, though we might be at the mercy of fate in many ways, our inner domain is impenetrable.
Do not add to your pain in your imagination. It is never unbearable and unending.
Many common annoyances are pain in disguise (sleepiness, fever, loss of appetite, …). When they start to get you down, tell yourself you are giving in to pain.
You control you response to events
While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.
Your actual needs are small
When we become successful, …, we get so used to what we have, we half believe we’d die without it. This is just the comfort talking.
Assets
Some people put their money in assets - stocks, bonds, property. Others invest in relationships or accomplishments. But a third type invests in themselves - in being a good and wise person.
Frenemies
There is nothing worse than a wolf befriending sheep. Avoid false friendship at all costs. If you are good, straightforward, and well meaning it should show in your eyes and not escape notice.
/Marcus Aurelius
What’s the meaning of life?
It is not our question to ask. Instead, it is we who are being asked the question. It’s our lives that are the answer.
/Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning
Accepting what is (and maybe even enjoying it…!)
Something happened that we wish had not. Which of these is easiest to change: our opinion or the event that is past?
The answer is obvious.
Accept what happened and change your wish that it had not happened. Stoicism calls this the “art of acquiescence” - to accept rather than fight every little thing.
No matter how much preparation, no matter how skilled or smart we are, the ultimate outcome is in the lap of the gods. The sooner we know that, the better we will be.
Play your part well
Remember that you are an actor in a play, playing a character according to the will of the playwright. If he wishes you to play the beggar, play even that role well…
/Epictetus… [your role] begins with acceptance and understanding - and a desire to excel at what we have been assigned.
It’s not the thing, it’s what we make of it
When you are distressed by an external thing, it’s not the thing itself that troubles you, but only your judgment of it.
/Marcus Aurelius
Enjoy the moment
Perhaps today will be the day when we experience happiness or wisdom. Don’t try to grab that moment and hold on to it with all your might. It’s not under your control how long it lasts. Enjoy it, recognize it, remember it. Having it for a moment is the same as having it forever.
There is no point measuring against others:
Measuring ourselves against other people makes acceptance difficult, because we want what they have, or we want how thins could have gone, not what we happen to have. But that makes no difference.
Why am I being so sensitive?
If someone is being annoying, try talking to them about the problem with their behavior, or ask yourself: Why am I being so sensitive?
Habits
Four habits if the stoic mind:
- Accept only what is true
- work for the common good
- Match our needs and wants with what is in our control
- Embrace what nature has in store for us
Learn -> practice -> train
A model of late stoic practice
Know thyself
Now - right know - you have the time to explore yourself, to understand your own mind and body. Don’t wait.
Who am I?
What’s important to me?
What do I like?
What do I need?
Every person is born with a death sentence. Every second that passes by is one you’ll never get back
Let each thing you would do, say or intend be like that of a dying person
/Marcus AureluisDeath is one prophecy that never fails
/Edmund Wilson
What do you have ot show for your years?
One day, our hours will begin to run out. It would be nice to be able to say: “Hey, I really made the most of it.” Not in the form of achievement, not money, not status - you know what the Stoics think of all that - but in wisdom, insight, and real progress in the things that all humans struggle against.
Your memory will be forgotten, sooner or later
Everything lasts for a day, the one who remembers and the remembered
/Marcus Aurelius