This is the Main Thing | Ask Daily Stoic

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Daily Stoic

Episode Title: This is the Main Thing | Ask Daily Stoic
Host: Ryan Holiday
Date: April 2, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Ryan Holiday explores the central Stoic value of humility amidst success and achievement, drawing upon personal stories and audience Q&A from a live event. The theme is rooted in the Stoic balance between striving for excellence and maintaining humble indifference toward status or accolades. Ryan responds to diverse listener questions, from handling grief and building discipline to navigating uncertainty and understanding what’s in or out of our control.

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Main Theme: The Centrality of Humility in Success

(00:00 - 02:04)

• Ryan opens by reflecting on notable Stoics—Seneca, Cato, Marcus Aurelius—who lived successful, public lives but did not measure their worth by accolades or power.
• He references the novel The Moviegoer and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations to emphasize the Stoic principle: "The main thing, Walter… is to be humble."
• Success is not shunned, but humility is the true measure:

  “He measured himself not by how many honors he’s received, but how many he’s turned down.” (Ryan Holiday, 01:14)

• Ryan encourages listeners to pursue achievement—while remaining indifferent to external validations.

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Key Discussion Points and Audience Q&A

1. How Do Stoics Deal with Grief?

(06:40 - 08:13)

• Listener Question: "How would Stoics confront something like grief? It doesn’t pass, it kind of comes back."
• Ryan’s Response:
  • Debunks the stereotype that Stoics are unfeeling or indifferent to pain and loss.
  • Seneca’s "Consolation" essays are cited as primary Stoic texts on grief—demonstrating the philosopher’s deep emotional struggles.
  • Grief, Ryan explains, is a fundamental human experience and is not to be suppressed or ignored:

    "You don’t shrug it off. There are ways to think about it, there’s ways to process it, there’s ways to deal with it. But it’s also just a part of life." (Ryan Holiday, 07:25)

• Emphasizes acceptance and purposeful processing of grief rather than denial.

2. How Do You Read More?

(08:13 - 10:37)

• Listener Question: “Are there any helpful hints for how to read more? How to read lots?”
• Ryan’s Response:
  • Dispels the myth of "speed reading," calling it a "scam":

    “People who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading… Reading is hard and to do it well... But also, people who like reading like spending time reading.” (Ryan Holiday, 08:32)

  • Encourages treating reading as both professional development and personal pleasure:

    “Nothing gets me more excited than finding out there’s like a thousand-page book about something I’m really interested in…” (Ryan Holiday, 09:33)

  • The only way to read faster, he notes, is to build expertise in a subject, reducing the need to pause for clarification.

3. Building Discipline & Navigating Uncertainty

(10:37 - 13:09)

• Listener Reflection: Starting small—think in five-second increments to nudge action and build discipline.
• Listener Question: “What do you do when you don’t know what to do? How do you plan when it’s not even clear how to plan?”
• Ryan’s Response:
  • Recommends taking walks as a “magic trick” for gaining perspective and clarity:

    "Maybe the single best thing you could possibly do to think better, to think more clearly... I try to take a walk every single day." (Ryan Holiday, 11:25) “My philosophical and meta practice is inseparable from my walking practice.” (Ryan Holiday, 12:25)

  • Shares personal anecdotes about the reflective power of daily walks—movement helps unjam the mind and surface small actionable steps.

4. Focus on What You Can Control

(13:09 - 14:53)

• Listener Insight: “Focus on what you can control and act on it.”
• Listener Question: Where is the line drawn between what you can and can’t control, especially when it feels blurred?
• Ryan’s Response:
  • Admits the line isn’t always clear:

    “There’s a middle gray area of stuff we have some influence over… If you are super literal about what’s in your control and what’s not in your control, you can neglect things that... could have this impact.” (Ryan Holiday, 13:44)

  • Encourages recognizing both the obvious (weather, fate) and the ambiguous, but stresses not to waste energy on the uncontrollable.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The main thing… is to be humble. To make Golden Fleece and be humble about it might have meant a lot to others, he was saying, but it didn’t mean anything to him.” (Ryan Holiday, 00:45)
• “Speed reading is a scam. There’s almost nobody who reads a lot who does speed reading… Name another pleasure that you try to get over as quickly as possible.” (Ryan Holiday, 08:32)
• “Take a lot of walks. Maybe the single best thing you could possibly do to think better, to think more clearly...” (Ryan Holiday, 11:25)
• “There’s a middle gray area of stuff we have some influence over… it’s more complicated than not.” (Ryan Holiday, 13:44)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00 - 02:04: The theme of humility in success and Stoic indifference to accolades
• 06:40 - 08:13: Responding to grief as a Stoic
• 08:13 - 10:37: Debunking speed reading, philosophy of ‘reading a lot’
• 10:37 - 13:09: Discipline through action and using walking for clarity
• 13:09 - 14:53: The blurry line between what we can and can't control

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Closing Thoughts

This episode distills Stoic wisdom into practical guidance for modern life. Ryan’s anecdotes and listener interactions illustrate that true Stoic practice is less about suppressing feeling or rapid achievement, and far more about humility, deliberate and thoughtful action, and honest self-assessment. The central lesson: pursue excellence, live fully, but remember — the “main thing” is to be humble.

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For more: Join Ryan Holiday on future tour dates or explore Daily Stoic resources at DailyStoic.com.

Transcript

[Ryan 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. This is the main thing. There's nothing wrong with success. There's nothing wrong with power. There's nothing wrong with living a nice life with achievement or admiration. Certainly many Stoics did precisely that. Seneca, Cato, Marcus Aurelius. They were important and well known. They were admired, they were influential. But you know what? They would have shrugged all that off. They appreciated the success, but it wasn't something they coveted. It may have impressed others, but it wasn't how they defined themselves. The main thing, Walter Wade says in Walker Percy's Stoicism inspired novel the Moviegoer, the main thing, Banks, is to be humble. To make Golden Fleece and and be humble about might have meant a lot to others, he was saying, but it didn't mean anything to him. That's how we might assume that Marcus Aurelius felt about a lot of what was thrown at him. In fact, one of the lines in Meditations suggests as much, where he says that he measures himself not by how many honors he's received, but how many he's turned down. He didn't make golden Fleece, but he did remind himself that the purple cloak of the emperor was nothing more than an ordinary one, dyed by shellfish blood. Clearly, he still tried to do things. He was still active in the world. He just measured himself by his humility, by his indifference, more than he did by his achievement or status. And so must we. We can still try to climb the ladder of success. We can be powerful. We can live a nice life. The main thing, though, is to do this and be humble even. So humble. Even if you have achieved an impressive amount, even if you have done many impressive things,

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I had a crazy 36 hours or so back in February.

[Ryan Holiday]

Took my kids to school, went for a nice run around town, Lake, took a shower, went to the airport, flew to Las Vegas, drove about 45 minutes

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outside Las Vegas, gave a talk at

[Ryan Holiday]

a hotel at, I don't know, 7 o', clock, finished at 8, went straight to the hotel room, changed into some slightly more comfortable clothes and then I drove. I drove from Vegas to Phoenix.

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They told me it would be like Four hours. It was like five hours. And there's also a time change in there.

[Ryan Holiday]

So I got in at like 2 in the morning. I crashed and then I had to get up at, I don't know, 7am

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I gave a talk to the Chicago Cubs, then a talk to the Arizona

[Ryan Holiday]

Diamondbacks, then I had a talk to you guys to Daily Stoic fans at a theater in Phoenix. Actually, my parents came, then we had dinner.

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After I crashed, woke up at like

[Ryan Holiday]

5am, flew home in time to take my kids to see a Harry Potter movie, live orchestra thing. That was more than 36 hours, I think.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I don't know. I can't keep track of it.

[Ryan Holiday]

I couldn't keep track of it at the time.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

It was crazy. But it was lovely. I got to do basically four talks in 24 hours.

[Ryan Holiday]

Got to see a bunch of you. And it was also prep for a busy summer and fall that I have coming up. I'm going to be in Portland and San Francisco in June, Minneapolis, Chicago and Detroit in August. And then in October, I'm going to be all over Australia and New Zealand. You can come see me Daily Stoic live. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you some of the Q and A that the people in Phoenix asked me. I think you'll like that. And hopefully it's a nice little preview

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

of a conversation we might be able

[Ryan Holiday]

to have there in Australia or California or Oregon or Illinois or Minnesota or

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Michigan, wherever you want to come see me, I will see you there soon.

[Ryan Holiday]

All right, let's get into it.

[Progressive Insurance Ad Voice]

How would Stoics confront something like grief?

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Like this very big, all consuming. It doesn't pass, it kind of comes back. Yeah, well, it sounds. It sounds like you're going through something too. So it sounds like a personal question. So I'm sorry. I think what we can say they would not do is shrug it off or say that it's nothing and you would never feel it. That's again the stereotype of the Stoics. And we know this because. And I'll just pointing to this is. It's better than any answer I could give you. Seneca writes three incredibly moving essays on Greek. They're actually called his consolation series. One of them is Consolation to his mother after he's been exiled and she's devastated and he's writing to both reassure her, but you can tell he's really trying to reassure himself. He writes to the daughter of a friend of his who is grieving her father who's devastated by grief. And I'm Forgetting who the other one is for. But Seneca, the stone philosopher, the philosopher that's supposed to not be affected by things or ravaged by emotions or whatever. Three of his best writings are only about dealing with this fundamentally devastating and overwhelming thing he's saying. You know, you don't shrug it off. There are ways to think about it, there's ways to process it, there's ways to deal with it. But it's also just a part of life. It's the one thing we all have in common because we all have that other thing in common, which is that we're moral.

[Listener/Caller]

Hey, Ryan.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Yes.

[Listener/Caller]

So I've seen your crazy stack of Lincoln books and just trying to figure out, are there any helpful hints for how to read more? How to read, lots.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Yeah, you speed read.

[Listener/Caller]

How do you do it all?

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Okay, so it's important that everyone realize that speed reading is a scam. There's almost nobody who reads a lot.

[Listener/Caller]

Who,

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

no, people who read a lot of books spend a lot of time reading and they spend a lot of time reading because reading is hard and to do it well and to spend time. But also people who like reading like spending time reading. And so why would I try to rush through it as fast as possible? Name another pleasure that you try to get over as quickly as possible. So, So I spend a lot of time reading. I think, I think about it as my job. Right? And it is, my job is I own a bookstore and I write books. But, but I spend a lot of time reading because it makes my life better and it's one of the highest ROI activities that I have. And by roi, being professional and personal makes me better as a human being, makes me better at my job. It also is enjoyable and lovely and makes me happy. So I spend a lot of time doing it. Should you spend as many hours as I spent reading books about Olympia? Probably not. I, I could give you one or two and save the trouble, but that's what I love doing. Like, nothing gets me more excited than finding out there's like a thousand page you look about something I'm really interested in, written by someone who, who, who's an amazing writer. And so I, I, that's what I love doing. But, but yeah, you spend a lot of time doing it. And I will say though, that the more time we spend reading, particularly about a singular subject, that is the only way I found to read faster. Like, if you want to read faster, know a lot about the topic you're reading about. That is one way to read faster because you, you're not like, wait, what is that? You're not stopping to look things up. You're not being confused.

[Listener/Caller]

You.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

You understand where this is going. And you can speed up a little bit. But other. There's really no way to read faster other than by doing the work of having read a lot about this subject. And. And it's good work, and it's worth it.

[Listener/Caller]

So you mentioned earlier with the question about how to actually get disciplined that you want to start small. Something that really helped me was to just think about the next five seconds and think, yeah, okay, in five seconds, what would I be really happy about if I did it right now? Oftentimes just like, get up, take a deep breath, fix your posture, something like that, and that starts to change. The nice things to do.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Yeah.

[Listener/Caller]

Ties into to how, like you said, like, there's always more before you count them. But in the face of, like, uncertainty about uncertainty, where you're not really sure how to do the counting, what kinds of things would stoics say about how to get started doing that when it's not even clear how to plan? And the tools that you have to plan aren't really. There's no. There's no clear precedent on what to do.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

So you're saying, what do you do when you don't know what to do? Is that request, how do we try

[Listener/Caller]

to make a plan?

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Yeah.

[Listener/Caller]

To do what we don't know what to do when we don't know how to make that play in the first place.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

I have a magic trick for you. Take a lot of walks. Maybe the single best thing you could possibly do to think better, to think more clearly, to get that sort of philosophical view, that perspective. I try to take a walk every single day. We found this dog on the side parkway, dumped it. And my kids assured me that they would do the walking. And I fell for that lie. But like, I take the dog for a walk, but really the dog is taking me for a walk. And really the dog is allowing me to do my thinking right. To get that perspective, to review the day or to prepare for the day. I think human beings were designed to think on the move. Right. We're the oldest evidences that we have of human beings honestly continent are our footsteps in White Sand national park of somebody traveling with their. Their young child, probably a woman carrying a kid. And that. That walk there on their. Their path is crisscrossed by, like, giant swath tracks and all these species that don't exist anymore. Like, that's what we were evolved to do to Travel long distances. And I think that's. There's something about walking kind of jobs in mind. So to me, my philosophical and meta fracas is inseparable from my. My walking practice. And when I'm jammed up writing or frustrating or pissed off, I. I take a walker. It usually, Usually makes whatever that next small thing a little bit clearer. It's a. It's a well known back in my house that no one's allowed to talk to me after I get back from a run or a walk. The first couple minutes. Is there stuff I gotta write down?

[Ryan Holiday]

Lose it.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Don't say you're.

[Listener/Caller]

I just want to say this is my introduction to stoicism, so I want to say thank you. Yeah.

Welcome.

Yeah, I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. What I picked up from. There's a lot of information, but what I picked up and the biggest lesson from kind of what I. What I learned is focus on what you can't control and act on it. And correct me if I'm wrong on that.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

Yeah.

[Listener/Caller]

But the first thing that I kind of thought of when I was thinking of that is where. Mr. Line drawn between what you can and what you can't really control. Because if you start to overthink it, which I definitely was in my seat, the lines seem to get a little blur.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

So I was just wondering. I. I wish there was a very clear line between what was in our control and what isn't. I mean, there's some stuff that's obviously not in our control. The weather or, you know, when we're born or how tall we are, things like that. But there is a middle ground that stoic writers have talked about, you know, a very long time. There's that middle gray area of stuff we have some influence over. And if you are super literal about what's in your control and what's not in your control, you can sort of neglect things that, hey, it's, There's a probability of doing. If you do X, Y and Z, it could have this impact. So there, there is some, some, Some gray area there. I wish there was a, you know, a clear bucket this side and this side. It's. It's more complicated than not. But I think first and foremost, we have to sort of stipulate that there's a bunch of stuff that's outside our control. We spend a lot of time and energy upset about those things, trying to change those things, blaming people for those things, wishing those things or otherwise. And that's all energy that could be spent on the other stuff.

[Ryan Holiday]

Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it.

[Ryan Holiday (Host/Philosopher)]

We love serving you.

[Ryan Holiday]

It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor.

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Please spread the word, tell people about it.

[Ryan Holiday]

And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

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