I’m constantly amazed by how easily we love ourselves above all others, yet we put more stock in the opinions of others than in our own estimation of self…. How much credence we give to the opinions our peers have of us and how little to our very own!
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.4

How quickly we can disregard our own feelings about something and adopt someone else’s. We think a shirt looks good at the store but will view it with shame and scorn if our spouse or a coworker makes an offhand remark. We can be immensely happy with our own lives—until we find out that someone we don’t even like has more. Or worse and more precariously, we don’t feel good about our accomplishments or talents until some third party validates them.

Like most Stoic exercises, this one attempts to teach us that although we control our own opinions, we don’t control what other people think—about us least of all. For this reason, putting ourselves at the mercy of those opinions and trying to gain the approval of others are a dangerous endeavor.

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.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Joy for human beings lies in proper human work. And proper human work consists in: acts of kindness to other human beings, disdain for the stirrings of the senses, identifying trustworthy impressions, and contemplating the natural order and all that happens in keeping with it.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.26

When dog trainers are brought in to work with a dysfunctional or unhappy dog, they usually start with one question: “Do you take it for walks?” They ask because dogs were bred to do certain tasks—to do work—and when deprived of this essential part of their nature, they suffer and act out. This is true no matter how spoiled and nice their life might be.

The same is true for humans. When you hear the Stoics brush aside certain emotions or material luxuries, it’s not because they don’t enjoy them. It’s not because the Stoic life is one bereft of happiness or fun. The Stoics simply mean to help us find our essence—to experience the joy of our proper human work.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

You say, good fortune used to meet you at every corner. But the fortunate person is the one who gives themselves a good fortune. And good fortunes are a well-tuned soul, good impulses and good actions.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.36

What is the more productive notion of good luck? One that is defined by totally random factors outside your control, or a matter of probability that can be increased—though not guaranteed—by the right decisions and the right preparation? Obviously, the latter. This is why successful yet mysteriously “lucky” people seem to gravitate toward it.

According to the wonderful site Quote Investigator, versions of this idea date back at least to the sixteenth century in the proverb “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” In the 1920s, Coleman Cox put a modern spin on it by saying, “I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.” (That saying has been incorrectly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who said nothing of the kind.) Today, we say, “Luck is where hard work meets opportunity.” Or is it typically flipped?

Today, you can hope that good fortune and good luck magically come your way. Or you can prepare yourself to get lucky by focusing on doing the right thing at the right time—and, ironically, render luck mostly unnecessary in the process.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Show me that the good life doesn’t consist in its length, but in its use, and that it is possible—no, entirely too common—for a person who has had a long life to have lived too little.
—Seneca, Moral Letters, 49.10b

There’s no need to show Seneca. Show yourself. That no matter how many years you’re ultimately given, your life can be clearly and earnestly said to have been a long and full one. We all know someone like that—someone we lost too early but even now think, If I could do half of what they did, I’ll consider my life well lived.

The best way to get there is by focusing on what is here right now, on the task you have at hand—big or small. As he says, by pouring ourselves fully and intentionally into the present, it “gentle[s] the passing of time’s precipitous flight.”

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

You get what you deserve. Instead of being a good person today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.22

I don’t complain about the lack of time … what title I have will go far enough. Today—this day—will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods and shake up the world.
—Seneca, Medea, 423-425

We almost always know what the right thing is. We know we should not get upset, that we shouldn’t take this personally, that we should walk to the health food store instead of swinging by the drive-through, that we need to sit down and focus for an hour. The tougher part is deciding to do it in a given moment.

What stops up? The author Steven Pressfield calls this force The Resistance. As he put it in The War of Art, “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I’m going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.'”

Today, not tomorrow, is the day that we can start to be good.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

But what is philosophy? Doesn’t it simply mean preparing ourselves for what may come? Don’t you understand that really amounts to saying that if I would so prepare myself to endure, then let anything happen that will? Otherwise, it would be like the boxer exiting the ring because he took some punches. Actually, you can leave the boxing ring without consequence, but what advantage would come from abandoning the pursuit of wisdom? So, what should each of us say to every trial we face? This is what I’ve trained for, for this my discipline!
—Epictetus, Discourses, 3.10.6-7

The Stoics loved to use boxing and wrestling metaphors the way we use baseball and football analogies today. This is probably because the sport of pankration—literally, “all strength,” but a purer form of mixed martial arts than one sees today—in the UFC was integral to boyhood and manhood in Greece and Rome. (In fact, recent analysis has found instances of “cauliflower ear,” a common grappling injury, on Greek statues.) The Stoics refer to fighting because it’s what they knew.

Seneca writes that unbruised prosperity is weak and easy to defeat in the ring, but “a man who has been at constant feud with misfortunes acquires a skin calloused by suffering.” This man, he says, fights all the way to the ground and never gives up.

That’s what Epictetus means too. What kind of boxer are you if you leave because you get hit? That’s the nature of the sport! Is that going to stop you from continuing?

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

What’s the point of having countless books and libraries, whose titles could hardly be read through in a lifetime. The learner is not taught, but burdened by the sheer volume, and it’s better to plant the seeds of a few authors than to be scattered about by many.
—Seneca, On Tranquility Of Mind, 9.4

There is no prize for having read the most books before you die. Even if you were the most dedicated reader in the world—a book a day, even—your collection would probably never be bigger than a small branch library. You’ll never even come close to matching what’s stored in the servers at Google Books or keep up with the hundreds of thousands of new titles published on Amazon each year.

What if, when it came to your reading and learning, you prioritized quality over quantity? What if you read the few great books deeply instead of briefly skimming all the new books? Your shelves might be emptier, but your brain and your life would be fuller.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman