2,010 episodes

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.
New episodes come out every day for free. Listen 1-week early on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday and to all episodes ad-free, with Wondery+ or Amazon Music with a Prime membership or Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.

The Daily Stoic Wondery

    • Education
    • 4.5 • 4.1K Ratings

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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.
New episodes come out every day for free. Listen 1-week early on Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday and to all episodes ad-free, with Wondery+ or Amazon Music with a Prime membership or Amazon Music Unlimited subscription.

Listen on Apple Podcasts
Requires subscription and macOS 11.4 or higher

    How to be an Honorable Leader and Combat Imposter Syndrome | Admiral Bill McRaven

    How to be an Honorable Leader and Combat Imposter Syndrome | Admiral Bill McRaven

    Ryan speaks with Admiral Bill McRaven about the nature of being a Stoic, imposter syndrome when being a leader, and how resilience is sometimes enduring injustice. They also discuss McRaven’s two books, The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple and Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe Even The World.

    Admiral Bill McRaven is a retired US Navy four-star admiral. He served 37 years as a Navy SEAL leading men and women at every level of the special operations community. During those four decades, Admiral McRaven dealt with every conceivable leadership challenge, from commanding combat operations—including the capture of Saddam Hussein, the rescue of Captain Phillips, and the raid for Osama bin Laden.

    Get a signed copy of The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple and Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe Even The World from The Painted Porch.

    Check out Admiral McRaven’s other books: Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare Theory and Practice, Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations, and The Hero Code: Lessons Learned From Lives Well Lived.

    ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail
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    Do This While You Can | The Portable Retreat

    Do This While You Can | The Portable Retreat

    It’s funny, over here at Daily Stoic, we do these challenges throughout the year (maybe you’ve joined one before). On the one hand, this name is probably bad marketing. People don’t usually get excited by the thought of being challenged. In fact, what they usually want is a secret or a shortcut or a hack. They want someone to solve the challenges for them. On the other hand, isn’t embracing life’s challenges what Stoicism is all about? So naturally, we couldn’t call the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge anything but that. It is a challenge. 10 days straight of them. Starting now.

    So yes it’s been a long December, but as the song also reminds us, there’s reason to believe that this year will be better than the last. And that reason is you—if you allow yourself to be, if you challenge yourself, if you decide to climb out of your velvet rut. A person who has never been challenged, Seneca said, who always gets their way, is a tragic figure. They have no idea what they are capable of. They are not even close to fulfilling their potential. “Stop wandering about!” Marcus Aurelius said to himself, perhaps on the eve of a new season just like this one. “Get busy with life's purpose,” he commanded, “toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue–if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.”

    And so as the seasons change, as the clocks change, we want to urge you one last time to join us and thousands of other Stoics in The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. Because one of the best ways to cure anxiety, to deal with stress, and to become present is to really throw yourself into some means of self-improvement. Stop procrastinating. Break out. Break free. Get cleaning. Challenge yourself.




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    • 12 min
    It's Time To Get Clean | Kentucky Wildcats Basketball

    It's Time To Get Clean | Kentucky Wildcats Basketball

    On this weekend episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, Ryan talks with Kentucky Wildcats Men's Basketball Team in which he focuses on the timeless wisdom of the four cardinal virtues—wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance—Holiday adeptly tailored his message to the elite world of collegiate basketball.

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    Today is that day many dread—the day the clocks spring forward. Yes, in the middle of the night, you lost an hour that you’ll never get back. An hour of sleep, an hour of leisure, an hour to spend with your kids. You mourn that loss of time, wondering all the ways you could’ve spent it otherwise.

    Don’t fall into this trap and join us TODAY for the Spring Forward challenge. It starts March 19 and is set up to push you to examine your habits, your choices, and your relationships to move you closer to living your best life here and now.




    *A note on the audio for this episode: an issue with Ryan's live mic resulted in the discrepancy in audio quality that you hear. We apologize for the inconvenience.

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    • 20 min
    Seasonality and Understanding Pseudo-Productivity | Cal Newport PT 2

    Seasonality and Understanding Pseudo-Productivity | Cal Newport PT 2

    Ryan continues his conversation with computer science professor and bestselling author, Cal Newport. They discuss how to be indispensable in your personal and professional life, the myth of busyness, Cal’s latest book Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, and more. 

    Cal Newport is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general-audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. He is the author of eight books, including Slow Productivity, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. Newport is also a contributing writer for the New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast.

    Watch or listen to Cal’s podcast, Deep Questions.

    Subscribe to Cal’s newsletter, here. 

    Listen to Cal’s take in The Wealthy Stoic: A Daily Stoic Guide To Being Rich, Free, and Happy. 




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    • 1 hr 8 min
    Every Day Is A Chance For This | The Present Is All We Possess

    Every Day Is A Chance For This | The Present Is All We Possess

    That was the purpose behind Stoicism, behind the journaling, and the reading, and studying of this philosophy, behind the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge (which starts on Tuesday, the first day of spring)—to use each day as an opportunity to improve yourself action by action, step by step. This might not seem like much, as Zeno said, but it adds up to no small thing.

    Every one of us wants to improve, wants to be better, wants to have better habits, live better, think better. But most of us wait to launch that business, write that novel, develop that fitness routine, to do what we know is right. We’ll do it when we’re more secure, we say, we’ll do it later, or in the fall, or next year, when things get back to normal. But putting things off is the biggest waste of life, Seneca reminds us. It snatches away the present in exchange for some promised future.

    Every day is a new season. Every day is spring, whatever hemisphere you’re in. Every day is a chance for a new beginning. That every day we awake, we can choose a new life, a new way, to rededicate ourselves to becoming the best versions of ourselves.

    As we’ve been saying, this is a chance to begin afresh, afresh, afresh. And that’s what we’re all going to be doing in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It’s designed to push you to examine those parts of your life, those habits, those choices that could move you closer to living your best life. You could have the good life, the life you deserve, right now!




    Participants will receive:

    ✓ 10 Custom Challenges Delivered Daily (Over 15,000 words of all-new original content)

    ✓ One live Q&A session

    ✓ Printable 10-Day Calendar With custom daily illustrations to track progress

    ✓ Access to a Private Community Platform

    It is a new season, and it can also be the beginning of a new you, too. Give yourself 10 days of improvement and a runway for true, sustainable change.

    Challenge yourself to spring forward to be the person you know you can be. Don’t wait any longer to live the life you deserve. Head over to dailystoic.com/spring and sign up NOW!

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    ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

    🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.

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    • 11 min
    Don’t Rush Through This | Ask DS

    Don’t Rush Through This | Ask DS

    Seneca makes the point, however, that what we are really rushing towards—with all deliberate speed—is death. That’s what he means when he says that we get death wrong. Death is not some distant thing in the future, not some one-time thing that looms ahead. Instead, death is something happening to you right now. It’s happening as you read this email (hope it’s been worth it!), it’s happening as you struggle to put your daughter’s shoes on so you can drop her off at school and then it’s happening still more as you sit down to that coffee meeting you rushed to even though you didn’t want to have it in the first place. It happens as you procrastinate, it happens as you distract yourself, it happens as you make bad choices, it happens as you worry and dread and whine.

    And that’s why we created The Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. It’s a set of ten brand-new actionable challenges designed to push you to examine your choices, your relationships, and your day-to-day patterns and move you closer to living your best life.

    “Remember how long you’ve been putting this off,” Marcus Aurelius writes, “how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them.” He reminds us “that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”

    Don’t rush through life, don’t rush toward death. Use the time assigned to you and sign up for The Spring Forward Challenge NOW at dailystoic.com/spring! Challenge starts March 19!




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    On today's episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with Kentucky Wildcats Men's Basketball Team in which he focuses on the timeless wisdom of the four cardinal virtues—wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance.

    *A note on the audio for this episode: an issue with Ryan's live mic resulted in the discrepancy in audio quality that you hear. We apologize for the inconvenience.




    ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail

    🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.

    📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

    See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

    • 12 min

Customer Reviews

4.5 out of 5
4.1K Ratings

4.1K Ratings

macsmudge34 ,

Start making your life better today

I’ve searched for a long time for something that would help me stop overthinking the things in my life that don’t matter.

Why spend so much time worrying what others think, why fixate on how others have wronged me, why do I regret my reflexive and emotional reactions to events when I’ve had a little time to reflect?

Ryan Holiday’s podcasts and books have put me on a path of self-reflection that are beginning to help me solve these issues in my life.

Give the stoics a chance. Their wisdom is timeless and fits today’s problems as well as they did centuries ago.

JVADBY ,

Awesome

This is my go to podcast daily!! Love it and love Ryan's books as well.

FutureDoctorHouse ,

Approachable and applicable philosophy

Ryan Holiday’s books and the Daily Stoic newsletter have directly helped me - and, by extension, my company - overcome many of the challenging times over the past several years. I appreciate both the long-form book and bite-sized newsletter formats, and the podcast adds extra dimensionality to the content he and his team share. In particular I like hearing how such a diverse array of guests - from entrepreneurs like Tim Ferris to entertainers like Matthew McConaughey - apply stoic principles in their own lives, which makes the concepts less abstract. My favorite episode by far is the one with neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris who similarly has brought practical ancient wisdom to the masses through clear and updated writing. Highly recommend!

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