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The Daily Stoic
This Is The Part To Love | "I Spent 6 Years Researching The Most Elusive Trait In The World"
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Foreign welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is Based on the 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more visit Dailystoic.com this is the part to Love it seems crazy. It seems insensitive to even suggest that someone loved their fate. How are you supposed to love a breakup? Love that you buried someone? Love that you lost your business? Love that you got robbed? Love that accident? Love political dysfunction or even persecution? Well, we can clear that up right now. The Stoics didn't love the fire that swept through Rome. They didn't love the betrayals and the backstabbing. They did not love funerals or cancer or losing an election. They did not love the plague. That's silly. No, what they loved was what this demanded of them. They loved the opportunity for virtue and arete that disasters and troubles and setbacks and loss presents us. The part they embraced was not the loss. The part they embraced was what it gave them. A chance to be there for others. A chance to grow. A chance to throw themselves into rebuilding. A chance to start over. A chance to be courageous and decent and kind. That is the part we love. We love that. It gives us more of ourselves. That this experience, however unfair, however painful, however avoidable it is, can unlock something within us that if we do our work, if we hold true, we can emerge better than before. That we can make things better for others. We didn't ask for this, but here it is a challenge we must rise to. And if there's anything a Stoic loves, it's that a challenge. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. I've talked here before. We've made whole videos about it. Therapy has been incredibly helpful to me. It's given me emotional awareness. It's helped me process my feelings. It's helped me deal with stuff as a parent, as a spouse, and just a person in a crazy, busy, noisy, sometimes demoralizing world. And my therapy practice is part and parcel of my stoic practice, right? Analyzing and putting your feelings, your impressions, your views, values to the test. That's what therapy allows you to do. And there's a reason I use online therapy. Because it's more efficient. It takes less time. BetterHelp is built around making starting therapy easier. They connect you with a licensed therapist. You just fill out a questionnaire and you can match with a therapist in as little as a couple of days. With over 7,000 reviews and a 4.3 rating on Trustpilot, BetterHelp is a platform you can trust. You can click the link in the description below or just go to betterhelp.com dailystoke to get 10% off your first month of therapy. Hey, it's Ryan. I am recording this on my wife's phone, not at the office, at home because it was a long crazy day at the office. We called each other, she was driving home, I was driving from picking up the kids and we said what are we gonna do for dinner? And that's when I remembered we had HelloFresh in the fridge. HelloFresh is the number one meal kit in America making home cooking easier with chef crafted recipes and fresh ingredients delivered straight to your door. And this fall, they're serving up even more to love. This isn't the HelloFresh you remember, but it's bigger. It's doubled its menu. It's healthier. They've got a healthier menu including 15 high protein recipes each week. And it's tastier. You can get steak and seafood recipes delivered every week for no extra cost. Discover new seasonal produce each week, from leeks to broccolini to Italian eggplant and more. As I said, we love Hellofresh because they curate meals that are not only easy to make, but they are delicious. The best way to cook just got better. Go to hellofresh.com stoic10fm to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life one per box with active subscription free meals applied as a discount on first box. New subscribers only. Varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com to get 10 free meals plus free breakfast for life every day. For the last six years I have been working on a series of books about the cardinal virtues. Courage, Discipline, Justice, Wisdom. I'm Ryan Holiday, best selling author of the Obstacle Is the Way, the Daily Stoic and now this Stoic Virtue series. Courage is Calling. Discipline is destiny. Right thing right now. Finally, wisdom takes work. Writing a book is not something that happens overnight. It's not something you do in one pass. Doing a book takes work. It takes consistency. It takes discipline. In this video you'll see everything that went into writing my last book, Wisdom Takes Work. Let's dive in. I guess in the old days they would call this a sanitarium or rest cure, but I'm working on Some shit on myself in Arizona and had a little time. And so I am going over the first batch of note cards. I've been accumulating the note cards from the Wisdom book since 2019. Some of them are just plain. Some of them are on the note cards I printed up later. I'm just going through them and marking vaguely where they'll go in the book. Normally this is a process I start in the office, on the big table in my office. But I'm going to do it now here. I just thought I had a little dead time. Lifetime dead time. I'm in a good headspace. I wanted to make what progress I could. So, like these two cards will go in the intro. I think this is another intro card. So I'm just writing intro at the top. So sign on as I'm writing three for part three here. Sometimes two or three, these will go into piles and in the different segments later on, stack of note cards. This is week two of laying the book out. I am already running out of space from the table, but hopefully these will start to come together a little bit more. Maybe I'll have to start using other surfaces. Great. So basically what I have here are all the uncategorized stuff that I think pertain to part two. So basically this is a. Think about this in three months bio. This is the intro. So this is very relevant that's looming. These are all categorized stuff. So I don't know where it's going to go in the book, but I. A theme is emerging and then this is part three. So God knows when I think about this, but I'm going to put these away because I'm already running out of space. Space on the table. So I was down here in Florida in August of 22 working on part one, the early stages, part one of the justice book, which I wasn't sure if it was going to come together or not. I wasn't sure how it was going to go. The book was still, you know, in pieces, the instruction manual not clear. I wasn't sure how the book was going to work. So here I am now in March of 24 and I'm in the exact same spot on the Wisdom book. I was here for a week. I wrote maybe two and a half chapters or I got the starts of two and a half solid chapters. And so I'm just trying to remind myself, like it'll come together. Because the funny thing is I was also, even though it was spring break for my kids, I also had to sign 2,000 of the 15,000 tippins that I'm doing for the justice book. And so the idea is I've got the final bit of the justice book in my hands as I am in the same place, literally and figuratively, as it was in the last book. And that's sort of the process that you remind yourself of. You remind yourself. It's a process. It comes together. You do the work. You don't think about the outcomes. You just keep your head down, keep chipping away at it, and it starts to come together. Working on the book. And this crazy thing happened yesterday. Like the first, I think I'm on chapter four, chapter five. They're all male examples. Like just a smidge. Many male examples. And I thought it'd be awesome if the next chapter that I wrote was built around a female example. That's just vaguely what I was thinking. And so I decided to work on the Commonplace Book chapter. I've showed you, like, how I. All my. All my books are from note cards, right? And so I pull out this note card and it says, joan Didion did note cards. There's a mention of it in this book. I pull it up, sends me down a rabbit hole. I had totally forgotten that in Slatcham, towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion writes an essay called On Keeping a Notebook. Basically, everything that I want to build the chapter around is in this really awesome essay, which she wrote in the 60s. That's what I was working on yesterday. That's what I'm working on today. But the irony, the part that made it just feel so magical and cool is I don't know if you can hear this squeaking chairman. This is Joan Didion's chair. And I never met Joan Didion. I came to her writing a little bit late. Maybe she would hate what I do, but I think it's pretty fucking cool that I am sitting in the chair, one of the greatest writers of all time, and writing about her in one of my books. So, anyway, there's that. What changes when you hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list? Literally nothing. Back to work. This morning, I am going through John Stuart Mills autobiography, which according to this note, I first read in November of 2010. That's pretty cool. I'm doing a chapter on John Stuart Mill's nervous breakdown, which brought on by studying and thinking too much and presenting it as kind of a cautionary tale. So that's the project. Now it is Thursday, June 20th. Still had to drive my kids to school. Still had to feed the animals last night. Still regular fucking person. Nothing changes. You just do what you got to do. You get back at it. Usually as a writer I'm not a big believer on changing locations. I think you should be able to do your work where you are and the idea of traveling, going somewhere else and finding a good spot to write doesn't tend to work out. But last summer I did a chunk on the justice book in la. This summer I did a chunk on the Lincoln chapter here in Australia. And it's worked out okay. Not as well as I wanted, but I got some, I got some stuff done. It is 7pm on August 6, I guess in Australia. I'm going home tomorrow early in the morning. This is the second place we stayed. This is in Bondi. I got a decent amount done on the Lincoln chapter. Not as much as I wanted. I had this fantasy that I would come back with like the whole chapter done and it doesn't always go that way. I. I made some progress on some other stuff and I have an idea but I forgot my journals. So I was using this little kids notebook I got in a museum. I think what I'm going to have to do when I get back, I bought two extra books about Lincoln and I'm just going to have to do more reading. I need more material. And then what I'm going to do and I did the same thing on the justice book and on the discipline book. Sometimes you stop making forward momento. And my advice when you stop making forward momentum on a project is to go where you will have forward momentum. Go towards something that you have wrapped your head around. So actually I had some ideas for the next chapters I'm going to do in the book. So I'm going to put this Lincoln thing on pause while I do some more reading and just go back and focus on that and see if I can't get a better sense of what I need that chapter to do and then come back and backfill it. Just what I've written and the material I put down alone is 7,500 words. So almost certainly everything I need is there. It's just how to connect it all together and the point I want to make is not there. All in all though, very successful trip. It's funny, as I was doing it on stage, I talked in the talks that I did at Sydney Town hall and Melbourne Town Hall, I did a tour of all the books and I talked about the fourth book and I said I wish I could give you a good definition of the, the. The fourth virtue, the virtue of wisdom. But I can't because I'm currently writing about it. No, I'm. By that I mean I'm still figuring it out. And then I said, but maybe that's the point. You're supposed to be working on it. You're never supposed to actually arrive as it happened, like literally live on stage. I flipped open Meditations and I started to read some things that Marx really said he learned from Antoninus. And it gave me a sense of what I want to say in the chapter. So who knows? We'll see. I've got this manuscript to read on the plane to finish. I did about half of it on the way here. And we'll go from there. It is 5am on August 8th again today. Coming back, none of us slept. The kids woke up at 2 in the morning. I'm back in the office and I am going to work on first Chapter, Part three. It is Christmas Eve. I spent the morning with the family and now I am doing a little bit of editing. When I turned this in at the beginning of November, it was 99,000 words. I just got edits back from Julia, who did a nice pass on it, and I'm down to 81,225. I think I can get another 2,000 words out and then I may call it, I don't know, listening to the gang of Youths. It's a good day. This is my Christmas presentation to myself. I just love doing this. I did about an hour on the manuscript today, maybe a little more. I might come back to it later, but I'm now at 80,715 words. So I'm chipping away at it. This is the work. I spent about a month doing this in LA in July of 23. And I took the justice book down about 10,000 words. And I think it was better for it. That's what you have to tell yourself. It's painful, but ultimately you're better for it. It's a Saturday morning. I'm down here in Florida, it's raining. So we didn't get to do our normal walk this morning. But I sat down to work on the manuscript. My wife went out with the kids for coffee and it's gonna be a big moment. So the book is currently 80,479 words. I took a while. I knew for a while I was gonna have to cut this. But now I am going to cut it and I'm gonna cut this chapter in Part three. That here, this is what. This is what the editor said. This chapter is pretty much just summarizing what the book is about. And so to keep. It doesn't really make sense. It's not adding anything new. There's a little piece of. I'm going to move probably to the afterword, but anyways. All right, let's do it. So 80,479 words. Let's hit delete here. 79,684 words. We did it. There's probably a little bit more, but. But we are now officially under where we want to be. All right, it is 3:12:12pm on the 31st, and the manuscript is going in. Is now February 17th. And I got an email, which I was both looking forward to and dreading this weekend, which is from my publisher. The copy edits back on the wisdom book, which I now have to go back through and do not just those edits, but I have this many note cards that I have to add into the book, which is going to require some cutting to make room for. So I have a bunch of work to do before this thing goes back. The publisher took six weeks to do the copy edits and then I have like three weeks to get them back. So I may have to ask for more time. But that is the next step in the process. One of the more excruciating ones. So it's just going to be notes on notes. See all these notes? So already a dispute with the copy editor. I have this quote. Of all the virtues, wisdom is the most elusive. But it's something to which you aspire, something that you attempt to one day acquire. I say, yet we approach that, we will almost certainly never get there. And that, at best, truism is something we can only approach despite a lifetime of work. It exceeds our grasp each time, slipping with each step further into the distance like the horizon that can never be reached. And he said, don't you mean escapes? The cliche is about a person's reach exceeding their grasp, not the goal exceeding their grasp. No, I'm referencing this exact quote from Robert Browning. Ah, but man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what is heaven for? So, no, you're wrong. I don't know what you're talking about, but this is what copy editing is like. One time out of ten they're correct. And then all the other times you're just like rolling your eyes at it. All right, here it is. What a manuscript for the new book came. Well, this is the first pass pages. This is six years in the making. The final book in the series. You want to see. You want to check it out. Yeah, it's not that fun. The secret to finishing big projects is to do them a little bit at a time. I have thousands of these tip ins. That's the first page in the new book. Wisdom Takes Work to Sign. And how am I doing all of these tens of thousands of pages a little bit at a time? That's what a lifetime dead time is about, too. I'm waiting for my food in a restaurant. So I'm signing a couple of these pages, see here? And then these get bound up, put in the book. I can't have given a talk about courage and a talk about discipline and a talk about justice, and then talk to these future commanders of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers and fighter jets about the idea of wisdom and not address the fact that you're removing books from a fucking library a few yards from here. I think this is the man. Oh, yeah. These are the second half pages of what's in back. These are like my notes in the margins. I'm going to record the audiobook off this tomorrow. Well, that is it. I've been at this audiobook for almost a month. Did it in smaller chunks this time so I could keep the energy up and my interest up. I finally did it. This is, I think, the fourth audiobook that I've recorded here in my studio next to the painted porch. And Wisdom Tate's work is now in the can. It will go to editing and then it will be out on October 21st. As I'm doing the audiobook, I am still making changes at this very late phase, which I'm sure my publisher is going to be pleased about. Wisdom, the final Virtue. What the final book in this series is about is an elusive virtue. All right. It is finally, finally here. Six years I have been working on this series. Actually since I was on a hike in Bathtub State Park. I had the idea and then I did. Courage and discipline, Justice. And now the first time, I am holding in my hands Wisdom. This is the fourth and final book in the Stoic Virtue series. And this is literally the first time I have gotten to hold it. And I am very excited. I just got back from a very wet, very stormy pre dawn run for a very full day of press for the book. I did 6.2 miles. My phone was going off in the middle of it. There's like a pre evacuation alert for mudslides and flooding. You know, it was very wet, but also enormous palm fronds were falling all around me as I was running. So was this wise? No, it was not. Wise. It was the opposite of wisdom. But before a very full day of press, you got to do whatever it takes to get regulated. So that's what I was doing. And a little bit of crazy is a good thing. All of this is a little bit crazy. So you got to balance it out. My next guest, my dear friend Ryan Holiday, argues that one way to deal with these changes is to cultivate wisdom in his new book Wisdom Takes Work. Wisdom Takes Work. Wisdom Takes Work. Wisdom Takes Work. I'm heading to the Daily show now. It is 5.09pm it should be fun. I did the Daily show once three years ago. Hopefully it goes well. Welcome back to another show. My guest tonight is the of Daily Stoic and a best selling author whose.
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Latest book is called Wisdom Takes Learn, Apply, Repeat.
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Please welcome Ryan Holiday. I think it's hard to subtract justice from any of the other virtues and at the same time, wisdom is the most essential in that it tells us what is or isn't, just how to bring that justice into the world, what to be courageous about, what is the moderate, the temperate, or the disciplined amount of something, what's too much, what's too little. The new book Wisdom Takes Work is now out wherever you buy books. This is the fourth and final book in the Stoic Virtue series. If you want me to sign it, you can head over to dailystoic.com wisdom to grab it.
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