The Daily Stoic - Can You Not Do It Even When You Really Want To? | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

A lot of times discipline is pushing yourself to do something you don’t want to do, but the other part of it—what we might call the temperance part—is not doing the stuff you do want to do.Ready to make real, lasting changes in your life? Our course Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness provides a proven framework to build and maintain positive habits that will transform your daily routines. Check it out here: https://store.dailystoic.com📕 Grab a signed copy of Discipline is Destiny by Ryan Holiday 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Shopping local might seem like a tough cookie, but truthfully finding Ontario Made products is a piece of cake. That's why supportontariomade.ca exists. With over 17,000 products listed, everything from cars to cosmetics, it's never been easier to shop local and support Ontario manufacturers of all sizes. When you choose Ontario Made, you're supporting your neighbors, strengthening our economy,

and celebrating the incredible products Ontario sells with pride. Discover what's made right here. Visit supportontariomade.ca. 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 2,000-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 Dailystoeic.com. Can you not do it even when you really want to? Look, if you hated the taste, if it didn't feel good, if you weren't getting good results, if it didn't guarantee a dopamine hit, it wouldn't exactly require much discipline to steer clear. That's the whole point of the virtue though, isn't it? That it's requiring you to resist an impulse or forgo a pleasure. As we said recently, discipline is about doing what's hard. Just as courage is the triumph over fear, discipline is the triumph over

another lower part of our nature. A lot of times, discipline is pushing yourself to do something you don't wanna do, but the other part of it, which we might call the temperance part, is not doing the stuff you want to do. And in some ways, this takes the most strength. Seneca said that we're all slaves to one thing or another,

sex or ambition or attention or chaos, and by indulging in these passions often enough, eventually we lose the freedom to abstain from them. We just can't not. We need discipline to push through that, to resist the urge to keep going when it's not serving us, to step back when our ambition tempts us to overreach, to recognize that rest and recovery and restraint are not signs of weakness, but also of strength and wisdom. True discipline means knowing when to stop. It's having the courage to say no to the extra hour, the extra project, the unsustainable pace,

so that we can sustain ourselves for the long haul. Discipline in this way isn't just about action, it's also about control, control over our impulses, our desires, even our most deeply ingrained habits. Without this, we are slaves. Only through temperance can we ever be free. And I talk a lot about that in Discipline is Destiny. I didn't just want it to be a book about do this, do this.

There's a bunch of things we need to stop doing and discipline is understanding that. You can grab a signed copy at store.dailystoic.com. But if you are looking for some better overall habits, you might like our Daily Stoic Course Habits for Success, Habits for Happiness, which is a six week deep dive into better stoic habits, which you can sign up for right now. Or you can join us in Daily Stoic Life and get it

and all our other courses for free. I'll link to that in today's show notes. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another Thursday episode of the daily stoic podcast. Back in November, I was on that little tour. I was in Europe and Canada and London was the first stop. It was at the Troxy. I was very nervous. It was a lot. I did an hour Q and A, then an hour talk, then another hour Q and A. But the first couple, I brought my kids.

It was their first time in London. We all got food poisoning on the first day. Thanks British Airways. Really appreciate it. It was my son's birthday and we got there. We were taking him to this restaurant he really wanted to go to. He wanted to go's birthday and we got there. We were taking him to this restaurant he really wanted to go to. He wanted to go to burgers and lobsters. He was so excited and then and then you know it was like that for a while. But recovered in time for the talk

and here are some questions I answered from the lovely folks in London. Enjoy. Enjoy! in this reaction of the soul. I wouldn't necessarily say that intuition is a bad thing, but yet the stoics instruct us to not act on our immediate reactions. So I want to know what you think about intuition or what the stoics would think about it. I think it's critical. The stoics are saying, don't act on your first impression. They're saying saying take that impression

and put it up to the test. Sometimes it is true and sometimes it is not. So they're not saying that your first impression is always wrong. They're just saying that our first impressions, our intuition is sometimes wrong or even often wrong. So that the discipline, the self-awareness, the process by which you can pause and reflect

and then act is the thing we are training to do. And look, I think intuition has to be trained itself. A lot of people go, oh, I'm gonna, you know, I trust my gut. But have they done the work? You know, I'm gonna trust, you're trusting your intuition here, but have you actually done the work to generate that intuition? Is that intuition based on anything real? Right? Like experience and understanding and training? Right? Like experience and understanding and training. Or is it ego and instinct and wishful thinking? So I have no problem with intuition per se. I just try to make sure that I am trying to think these things through first

Yeah So In my life time to read just one book. Yeah, what would be the book you would recommend me? Why do you have time to read one book? I reject the premise. Please tell me five of them. No, Seneca says that we want to linger on the works of the master thinker. So it's not that you're reading thousands and thousands of books

to check them off the list. I do think as you read, you want to find the books that really resonate with you, that really speak to you, and you want to read them over and over again. Every year I try to pick a handful of books I'm going to reread on top of books that I'm going to read, because the Stokes talk about how we never step in the same river twice. I mean, as I was saying, this is almost 20 years with me and meditations, and so each time I go back to it I find something new and that process of coming back to it and getting something new out of it is a key part so I don't actually reject the premise. If there was one or

two books that I could choose you were gonna read them over and over again you know Mark Suez's meditations wouldn't be a bad choice certainly but you just want general book recommendations that I like. Oh, that have impacted me a lot? Well this is also hard for me because the premise of my bookstore is that it's only my favorite books and we have a thousand titles. I'll take the easy way out and put meditations at the top and then I'll come up with some more for you. Yeah, of course Hello Ryan, I'm from Mexico Wow, yeah, I have read many of your books and I followed you for some time

And when I knew that you were going to be here exactly today on my birthday Which I was going to do some sightseeing in London. Oh amazing Universe I was going to do some sightseeing in London. Oh, amazing. Universe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm very happy. Nice to meet you. Good to be here too. You person. And I have a question for you. Okay. I have, I work as a psychologist,

a psychotherapist, and I try to follow all of this concepts every day in my professional practice and as a human being. And I have read about your kids, I've seen their pictures and they're really young. The question is, what do you do? Well, my daughter is 26 and she is not as disciplined as I would like her to be.

And I try to convince her to motivate her. I know that there are some personality traits that are hard to change, but what could I do? Were you as disciplined as you should have been when you were 26? Not that much in the middle. I'm scared. I'm scared. in some ways, and you know, it took me a while to work it out, which is what our our 20s are for, of course, what life is for, is sort of figuring it out, we're constantly twisting the dials, but I certainly wouldn't have been that responsive to my parents trying to tell me, you know, anything. Not that I would be responsive even now, and my little kids are not responsive either. This is the challenge of parenting.

Marcus Aurelius being the ultimate example of this, having Joaquin Phoenix as commonus, but maybe worse in real life as his son. but maybe worse in real life as his son. I'm fascinated by how it goes so badly for Marcus and why it goes so badly so often. Why great men and women of history so often have such... I don't know what the nice way to say this. Why their kids have so many problems. Commodus, Churchill's son Randolph,

Queen Elizabeth has a couple trouble children. Sires the Great's son was about as bad as Commodus, you know, on and on. Was that because the parents were too busy saving the world and saving everyone else and they neglected the family was the parent actually the opposite? Were they too attentive and overbearing and the child was like that out of spite or in defiance? Was it, I don't know, the strictness of Marcus Ruines made him a complete softie when it

came to his kids and he indulged them? Was it just random genetics? I don't know. You're the psychologist. But it's hard. It's hard. I would say probably patience, understanding, gentle prodding, space, and leading by example are probably our best bets. Thank you. Hi, you're right.

Hi. I've noticed you're wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt. Oh yeah. Just wondered, because I know the lyrics in some of their songs are very profound. Wondered if there was a particular one that you could share and elaborate on. I would say, and I just saw it in Sacramento last month. It was incredible.

in last month, it was incredible. I've always wondered why they don't have any explicit songs about this stuff. It seems like they've got stories about basically everything else at this point. I guess the People That Been Due is loosely based on a line from Julius Caesar, which is also a play about Cato, so that's the closest explicit connection. But if I had to pick a sort of stoic theme in any of their books, or sorry, their songs, I would probably pick wasted years, which is all about

sort of seizing the moment and realizing that sort of now is the golden years, it's not some moment in the future that you're gonna look back on fondly, it's right now and you're wasting it. There's a, I think a real strong memento mori theme in there that I've always been struck by. And maybe there's some fascinating momentum

where even Halib-B.L.A. which is about a man who's been sentenced to death on his way to the gallows. So that's my answer. I could hear it out for quite a while longer, but I'll spare all of you. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it.

We love serving you. 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. Please spread the word, tell people about it, and this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple

podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on wondery.com slash survey. Have you ever wondered how a circus performer could become the most powerful woman in the Byzantine Empire? Even the Royals is a podcast from Wondery that pulls back the curtain on royal families, from ancient empires to modern monarchs, to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty.

Before she ruled an empire, Theodora was a teen sensation in circus shows, featuring dancing bears, burlesque performers, and blood-soaked chariot races. But when her star came crashing down, she clawed her way from rock bottom to the very top, using everything from comedy to espionage to get there. Empress Theodora didn't just survive.

She revolutionized women's rights across the Byzantine Empire, like changing laws to let women divorce men, own property, and bring abusive men to justice. For all her work in pioneering, she's remembered as the most powerful Byzantine Empress in history. Follow Even the Royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Even the Royals early and ad-free

by joining Wondery+.