Ryan Holiday (6:46)
He says, you were not put here to huddle under the covers and stay warm. The morning is a sacred, special, wonderful time. Wake up, get after it. You were not meant to huddle under the covers and be warm. Take this quiet time. Don't get sucked into your phone right away. Use it. And if you're getting up early, then Number five bookends very nicely with that. At the end of the day, take some time to reflect on the time just passed through. Journaling. This is basically what Stoicism is. I would say Stoicism and Journaling are inseparable practices. And given how crazy, given how frustrating, given how overwhelming the year is likely to be, where and how are you going to be processing that? Where and how are you going to be holding yourself accountable? Seneca says we should basically interrogate ourselves. At the end of the day, he said he waited for his wife to go to sleep, and he would sit down and sit with the pages of a journal and look at what he did well, look at what he didn't do so well. He said, let nothing pass you by. Put it up for review. The evening review is the perfect way to wind down the day. Go to sleep and wake up and do better tomorrow. Stop giving your time away. It's crazy. The Stoics say that we are protective of our property and of our money, and then we're frivolous with our time. The one thing you can't recover, the one thing they're not making any more of. Life isn't short. Seneca says a year is a long time. The problem, we just waste it. We waste it on inessential things. We waste it getting distracted and upset by things that have nothing to do with us, that we can't control. Time is precious. Act accordingly. You only have so many hours in a day. You only have so many hours in a year. How are you going to spend them? And how are you going to spend them on things that matter? Always be challenging yourself. The Stokes would say, life is uncomfortable, so get used to being uncomfortable. Seneca would set aside a certain number of days throughout the year where he would survive on very little food or sleep on the ground. He would try to rough it, basically. And he said the point of this was to get up close and comfortable with conditions that you can then say to yourself, this is what I was afraid of. Most of the time, we're trying to make life easier and smoother. It's a good instinct, I guess. But the problem then is that this makes us afraid of losing that comfort. And if we can actively challenge ourselves, get outside our comfort zone, get familiar with other states of living and being that other people are petrified of, it makes us freer because then we can be more courageous. We understand we can handle whatever happens, and we're toughening ourselves up as we go. And that's always a good thing. You should do something for the common good every single day, right? The world is dark. Bad things are going to be happening in 2026. Things you don't like are gonna happen in 2026. If you wanna make sure you don't Live in a dark, screwed up, awful world. Well, one thing you can do is not be dark and awful. You can do good things, right? Stoicism is not just about self improvement. It's a philosophy around helping others and improving the world. Marcus talks about the idea of the common good something like 80 times in meditations. He says, actually, the fruit of a good life is good character and acts for the common good. So what is the good you're going to do? And if you can set a rule that you always try to do good, you'll have a good year. Number nine, silence. Distractions here at the beginning of the year, get a TV out of your bedroom. Get the phone out of your bedroom. Delete apps from your phone. Limit the inputs. We are needlessly bombarded by way too much noise, way too many things competing for our attention. And you got to learn how to shut this out. Stoics talk about concentrating like a Roman doing it, as if this thing in front of you matters. Being philosophical is the ability to go deep. It's the ability to lock in, the ability to tune out. And you're gonna need this in a crazy year. 10. Pause before you react. Athenodorus, an ancient Stoic who lived in the time of Augustus. He's an advisor to the future young emperor, back when his name was Octavian. And he tells Octavian that one of the keys to being a successful leader is that before he reacts to anything, before he does anything out of anger, he should count all 24 letters of the Alphabet. There only being 24 letters in the Alphabet. Then the idea is pause and reflect. You can have the emotion, you can have the feeling, you can be triggered, but what matters is whether you take the action on it or not. Pause and reflect. I actually carry a coin in my pocket that reminds me of this very idea. It's awesome. One of the things we do when we pause and reflect, we have to put every impression, an emotion and an opinion to the test, Right? This is what Stoicism is saying. I'm having this feeling, I'm having this thought. Is it true? Is it important? Is it in line with the values I have with the person I want to be? Epictetus talked about how a philosopher should be able to take every impression, opinion, bit of information it gets, and test it the way a money changer checks for counterfeit currency. He said they can bang it on the table and tell in an instant that if the metal is diluted or not. The idea is you're going to have emotions, you're Going to have strong opinions. You're going to think things and want to do things in 2026. But do you have the ability to go, hey, is my assumption here correct? Is my information correct? Right. Is this what I want to do? Is this who I want to be? You want to put all this stuff to the test? The Stoics were not emotionless. They just tried not to do things out of emotion. And that is a critical difference. If you want to have a rich 2026, reduce your desires. Epictetus says that if you wish for things to be as they are, you will have them. And so if you can reduce your needs, if you can reduce your baseline, if you can reduce your expectations, you'll have a rich and prosperous 2026. If this year or any year is dependent on you achieving or getting things at a certain level, then your success is going to be dependent on things going a certain way. And that's a vulnerable place to be. If you need a bigger house, a bigger car, if you need more followers, more attention, right, you're going to be on a treadmill this year. And that's what Seneca means when he said, it's not the person who has little that's poor. It's the person who wants more. The most avoidable form of poverty is wanting more than you have. The idea is being able to be grateful, to appreciate, to be good with what you've got. That's the recipe for a great year. Number 13. Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. That's Marcus Aurelius writing to himself in Meditations. The Stoic virtue of justice has nothing to do with whether things are legal or not. It doesn't matter if people are watching or not. It doesn't matter if you can get away with it. What they cared about is, is it the right thing to do? You have to have your code, you have to have your values, you have to have your ethics, and you stick by them. And by the way, in a world where it seems like everything is upside down, when. When bad people are getting ahead, when horrible things are happening and no one's being held accountable, one way you can get your bearings, one way you can make things right again is by focusing on doing the right thing again. Not expecting a reward, not expecting a parade, not expecting recognition, but saying, hey, I do what's right because that's what's in. In my control. That's the kind of person I want to be. That's the kind of world I want to live in. The Rest, the stoics say, doesn't matter. I mean, of course it does matter. And this is why we have a legal system and all of that. They're just saying that's not as up to you. And so what you should focus on is the part of it that's up to you, which is the standard of behavior you set and keep for yourself. Number 14, practice acceptance. Look, there's going to be stuff that happens in 2026 that you don't like, that you didn't want. And I don't just mean like out in the world. I just mean like, that's life, right? There's going to be travel delays, the stock market's going to go up and down, people are going to say things you don't like, like stuff's just going to happen. Nobody gets their way. And so what stoicism is, is an understanding that we have to accept this. That's very different than resignation, right? You accept that this happened and you focus on your response, your attitude, what you're going to do about it. This is what they mean when they say the obstacle is the way you want to treat what happens as an opportunity. But to first do that, you have to accept what it is and what it represents. You have to accept the things that closed and you have to accept the things that it opened for you. That's the form of acceptance you're going to need to practice in the year ahead. A couple of years ago, one of my wife's words for the year, we.
