The Daily Stoic - Stop Wasting This. It’s Precious | You HAVE To Read These Books (Stoic-Inspired Picks)

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

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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 Podcast. Get on board. Via Rail. Love the way. 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 Daily dailystoic.com. Stop wasting this. It's precious. Today, as every day, there will be endless attempts to take pieces of your time. Want to jump on a quick call to chat about it? Should we have coffee next week? Let's get together to discuss. It'll only take a half an hour.

These may seem like small requests, but they add up. As Charles Dickens wrote, rejecting an invitation from a friend, it is only a half an hour, it's only an afternoon, it's only an evening. People say this to me over and over again, but they don't know that it is impossible to command oneself sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes, or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day. Whoever is devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it and to find his recompense in it. I am grieve if you suspect of me not wanting to see you, but I can't help it," he said.

I must go in my way, whether or no. We are all misers about money and property, Seneca writes in The Shortness of Life, but so often we are careless with the one thing we can't get back, time. We let people steal it from us as if we have an unlimited supply. Look, we are not exactly poor when it comes to time, but we will soon be if we live beyond our means. We will run out quickly if we aren't smart about it. This is your life. Time is your most precious, irreplaceable asset.

You cannot buy more of it. So strive to waste as little as possible and stop selling it for pennies on the dollar. I don't know what 2025 is going to bring. It could be an unprecedented year or it could be just like so many years that have happened before. That's the thing about life, about history. It tends to repeat itself.

I think one thing we can take from a study of history is that 2025 will have challenges and difficulties. It will have people being like people. And that's one of the reasons we read. General Mattis, a lifelong stoic for decades in the Marine Secretary of Defense, he said, we want to read because it's unconscionable to learn by trial and error what other people have already learned from experience. And what philosophy does, what history does, what biography does, what biography does, what self-help books do, is they help us learn from the experiences of others.

And in today's episode, I wanted to give you some books that I think you should read in 2025, a year that again, is going to be unpredictable and have political dysfunction and wars and plagues and disasters and problems and mistakes and stressful moments as well as wonderful moments and joys and opportunities to grow and change and do great work. And these are books that I think like Seneca was saying allow you to add to your own experiences the hard-won and costly experiences of otherwise men and women from the past. All right, this one is really good. This is about a 109-year-old man named Charlie. David, who I've had on the podcast, he's a columnist for USA Today and The Wall Street Journal and

a bunch of different outlets, but he meets his neighbor who's 109 years old. And I had a similar experience. I got to know a guy named Richard Overton when he lived in Austin. He lived to be like 112. And obviously there's a bunch of great sort of practical lessons in here. But I think the main lesson that you get

from reading about a guy who's been here a century is it just kind of expands your timeline or your view of things, right? We get so caught up in the moment, we get so caught up in what's happening right now, that we forget that things like this right now has been happening for hundreds and thousands of years. When I talk to my grandmother who's 94, you know, I sometimes go, what was that decade like? Right? And it's, oh yeah, because when you've been around for nine of them, you can think in tenure chunks that way I sometimes go, what was that decade like? Right, and it's, oh yeah, because when you've been around for nine of them, you can think in tenure chunks that way.

I go, what was it like to live during the Cuban Missile Crisis? And obviously it's scary, but she's not so scared. She got through it. I think about when you talk to people like Charlie or my grandmother who lived through the Great Depression and World War II and the Cold War and all these things, you know, what you also take from them is they never go, oh it

was terrible and we never recovered. They got through it, they learned something from it, they integrated it into their lives. I remember I asked Richard one time, I said, you know, do you just take it day by day? And he said, at my age you take it day by night. I think there's some contrast there, right? Sometimes we're zooming way in the smallest increment of time possible and sometimes we're thinking about really big increments of time. And there's just something hard-won about the wisdom of people who have come before us that we should avail ourselves of. And this book does a great example of that. Seneca said,

we study philosophy because we want to annex other people's lives into our own. This is a chance for you to pick up a century of wisdom in a little less than 200 pages. Not a bad deal. This is Steve Magnus' book, Do Hard Things. There's a great quote from Seneca. He says, we treat the body rigorously so that it's not disobedient to the mind. To me, that's why a physical practice is so important. That's why diet is important. That's why getting up early is important. Obviously, there's just general health benefits to doing these things. But doing things

that you don't want to do, doing things because they are hard, that is good for you. It hardens you. You are better for having done it, right? Like maybe there's benefits to the cold plunge that I do, but really the benefit is doing the cold plunge that I don't wanna do and staying in it for the amount of time that I choose to stay in it. And Steve is a coach of many elite athletes and runners, elite performance, he's also just a great author,

but this is a great book as he says about how we get resilience wrong and the surprising science of real toughness. And look, it's gonna be a tough year. It's gonna be a challenging year. The one thing we know about the future is that it's probably not going to be easy. There are gonna be challenges and difficulties.

And by doing hard things, the Stoics say, we get the benefit of knowing that we are capable of doing hard things and we can meet the future with those skills and weapons that we develop today. This is Sarah Bakewell's How to Live a Life of Montaigne. There's also a great little biography by Stefan Zweig called Montaigne that I've been reading a lot since 2016. It's currently out of print or I'd also be holding it up for you right now. But what I love about How to Live is that in the true style of Montaigne, it's more about questions than answers. And Montaigne had a lot of questions about himself,

what made him tick. He talks about how so many people have made all these great scientific discoveries. They know about the heavens and the cosmos, but how many people know themselves? And Montaigne's journey was really to understand himself, to get to what we would call self-awareness. But what's interesting about Montaigne and why I think he's such a relevant figure right now

is that Montaigne lived in the midst of civil wars, the Protestant Reformation. He lived in a time of persecution and closed-mindedness and disruption and awfulness generally. And he has to sort of turn away from this. He retreats to his study where he engages in this sort of inward-looking philosophical pursuit. The world was falling apart and he said well what do I control? I control myself. I control whether I understand myself, whether I get to truth within myself.

And I think he's just a particularly relevant figure. As the world is falling apart, we need humility more than ever. We need self-awareness more than ever. We need empathy more than ever. We need curiosity and open-mindedness more than ever. The new world was being discovered in Montaigne's lifetime. And as these explorers were coming back, talking about barbarians and natives and these sort

of primitive people, he was primarily interested in what it reflected back to him about his own society. He was fascinated and repulsed by the barbarism of his time, the nonsensical practices and religious beliefs of his time. And so in Montaigne, there was this, the earliest signs of what today we would call pluralism, to live and let live, to be curious and not close-minded to how other people think about things. And so this is just a fascinating book. And again, that it's about questions and not answers makes this a very essential book for today's age.

Now obviously, I wrote a book called The Daily Stoic, which is one page a day. I didn't know about this format until unfortunately, way too late in my life. But there's something very powerful about reading just a page a day about something. And then not just a page a day once, but that same page every day for multiple years. Like the Daily Stoke has been out for something like eight years now. And so every day for eight years, people have been on this journey. And the Stokes talk about how we don't step in the same river twice. And what I've always loved about this book that I read one page a day of A Calendar of Wisdom by Tolstoy. It's actually a book that was forgotten, was banned by the Soviets,

repressed. We only rediscovered it, I think, in the 80s. It deserves to be much more well known. Here's Epictetus. It says, For a wise man, the wealth and glory and rewards of this rewards are like sweets or empty shells on the road. But the children pick them up and fight for them, he says. Let them kiss the hands of rich man, the rulers and their servants. For the wise men, all of these are but empty shells. The purpose of philosophy is to know what is valuable

and what is important, what to struggle for and what to stop struggling after. And so every day there's just a great meditation from Tolstoy. I have quoted this book many times in my books and every year I come back to it. Sometimes I notice things that I missed the first time or I missed the first several times. And this is a lovely book for 2025. Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, I think one of the great stoic texts, although not explicitly a stoic text, he survives four concentration camps and

comes out and writes a book that he had already written before the Second World War and before the Holocaust but was destroyed, taken from him, and he's forced to reimagine, rethink it. It's basically shaped in this insane ordeal that he is subjected to. And he talks about the inevitability of suffering, but that our choice, our purpose, is to find meaning in that suffering. And that's what he writes about in Man Search for Meaning. And then Edith Eager, who I've been lucky enough

to get to know and her family, I've had her on the podcast a few times, she would go on to be a student of Viktor Frankl, but she was at Auschwitz. And she builds her beautiful memoir around effectively stoic philosophy passed through sort of common sense wisdom to her through her mother, which is basically that, you know, we don't choose what happens, we choose how we respond to what happens. We have the choice, as she says, to decide who we're gonna be in what we are going through. And this is just a beautiful book. She is a beautiful person who I've

been lucky enough to get to know. Like, we don't control what the rest of this year brings, what the rest of our lives bring, but we choose what it's going to make us. We choose, as Frankel says, whether we're gonna find a meaning in that suffering and pain and struggle that is inevitably going to come during that time. So I can't think of two books more fitted to this moment. All right, so a lot of the Stoics talk about freedom, but they mean it metaphorically. They were incredibly powerful, rich, important people. They could do what they want. When Epictetus talks about freedom, he means it in both senses.

He means it figuratively and also literally. This is a guy who is in chains. He is a slave. He is a slave in the Roman Empire. One of the worst places you could possibly be a slave. And this collection by Princeton University Press is a collection of some of his best thinking, not writing, because his work survives of some of his best thinking, not writing, because

his work survives to us as lecture notes, but how he found freedom within the constraints, kind of like Victor Franklin and Edith Eager had to do. He had to find freedom inside of himself. Even though his literal body was owned, he said, no one can control your mind. Even though he was disabled, his leg is broken and badly damaged by some of the torture that his master inflicts on him. He says, lameness is an impediment to the body, but not the mind. And so he has to find freedom within his circumstances. We have to find freedom inside the craziness, inside the chaos. We have to find freedom within ourselves depending on where you live,

if those freedoms are being taken away from you. And I think ultimately what Epictetus realizes in what he writes is that even though there were wealthier and more powerful Romans than him, he was actually freer than they were because they were slaves to their desires, to their fears, to their opinions, to what other people thought of them, to their ambitions. And so he cultivates real freedom, freedom that Marcus Aurelius, a generation later, is genuinely jealous of, even though he's the emperor. So if you want to be more free this year, this is a book you absolutely have to read. Julia Baird writes an amazing book called Phosphorescence, which is

all about resilience and really sort of being illuminated, glowing, becoming better due to the difficulty and adversity you've gone through in life. And I think I read it three or four years ago. It was one of the best books I read that year. I recommend it then. I recommend it now. But then this book about grace. Grace is something we need a lot of these days. Oh, look, I'm on the back cover. A powerful book about from one of my favorite writers of something we all need more of, and could give more of. To me, you know, grace is understanding, it's forgiveness,

it's appreciation, it's patience patience, its endurance, its finding the good in people. You know, she talks a lot at the beginning of the book about that famous song, Amazing Grace. But you know the guy that wrote it? Do you know what that song is actually about? He was not a slave owner. He ran slave ships, like just a horrible person, until you realize that he was appalled by the person that he was and he became an abolitionist and helped bring about the end of slavery. So grace is something we all need but it's also something we have to give or we write off capacities, the capacity people have for change, for

surprising us, for growing, for doing good despite bad that they have done. And this is just an absolutely lovely essential book. I interviewed her on the Daily Stoic podcast when I was last in Australia. I'll link to that. But definitely a great book for this year. Of course, Mark Sturrile's Meditations is a book you should read not just this year, but every year.

It's designed to be a book that you read over and over and over again. That's a fresh copy. That sounds good, doesn't it? Meditations is a book that every time I pick up, I take something new out of it, right? We never step in the same river twice. This is the most powerful man in the world writing notes to himself about how to be better, about how to grow, about how to act with virtue and excellence. As he says on, this is the quote I have on the back,

which is one of my favorites. It says, concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Remind yourself of what nature demands of people. Then do it without hesitation and speak the truth as you see it, but with kindness, with humility, without hypocrisy.

So that's what Marcus Rielis was writing but it's also what he was aspiring to do and be in his life. He says elsewhere in meditations that we shouldn't talk about what a good person is like we should try to be one. There is a really good biography of Marcus Rielis that just came out this is by Dom Robertson, cognitive behavioral therapist, great writer and thinker on the Stoics. And he did a deep dive into the life of Marcus, how Marcus tried to be and do those things and where he succeeded on these things.

And so here you have a boy plucked essentially from obscurity, assumes the purple becomes the most powerful man in the world. Where did he fall short? Where does he surprise us? Who were the influences on his life? And what are the lessons he has to teach us? So many great things here. And as he says here on the back, I'll read this to you.

Marcus Tauris did not have a heart of stone. He was a man capable of knowing intense grief, perhaps especially for that reason, he committed himself to a lifelong training in philosophy. And Marcus came to realize that although a great leader may experience sorrow or anger, he cannot allow intense emotion to cloud his judgment. So again, a great life and great lessons for this year. I have two young boys. So I really liked Richard Reeves book of boys and men why the modern male is struggling, why it matters and what to do about it. Not just because I'm trying to raise great kids, but we live in a world politically and socially and

culturally right now that's defined, I think in some ways, by the backlash and anger and resentment and failures of a generation of young men who are struggling. And so I found this book to be great. It's made me a better parent. I interviewed Richard on the podcast, you can listen to that. But I think society functions best when everyone in society is functioning. And when you have a dysfunctional generation or a dysfunctional gender or a dysfunctional group of people, because they've been not given what they need, everyone suffers as a result of

that. And I think this message is very timely. Look, one of the best things you can do if you want to understand the current moment is to put distance and time between you and it. When I want to understand what's happening now in the world, I want to read about great men and women struggling with what was happening in their world a generation ago, 20 generations ago.

A couple of years ago ago I read this whole series from Taylor Branch on not just Martin Luther King himself, but all of the great civil rights leaders. And it helped me understand America today, helped me understand America then, it helped me understand human beings today and human beings for all time. This is an amazing book for people who are trying to master themselves. Like the civil rights movement was about coolness under pressure, under threat, under fear, willing to act courageously and bravely in pursuit of justice to the stoke virtues. But it's also a book about political change. It's a book about how and why the human mind works and does the silly, strange things that it does. And then how we forgive, how we grow,

how we change, how we improve. This is an epic series. It'll probably take you the whole year to read. But if those were the only books you read this year, this three book series, that would be a successful year. Speaking of the political moment, again, sometimes reading fiction is how you understand the current moment.

This book, It Can't Happen Here, was written in 1935 and it's about the rise of fascism, actually a democratic president who becomes a sort of a fascist leader in the mold of ones that were taking over in Europe at this time. And in the pages of fiction fiction I think you're able to understand your current moment better. The perennial themes of society and human beings is all here. I found this book terrifying, eye-opening, inspiring, challenging, all the things that great fiction is supposed to be. It was a massive bestseller then. It's popped on and off the bestseller list in the

last decade or so for good reason. Coming out of dysfunction, right? Like the reason fascism rose in Europe was a result of the Great Depression, the failures after World War I, the failures of the economic and the political and the cultural system. Things weren't working in the way that they're not working right now. The problem is that strong men, fascism comes in and says, I alone can fix it. Listen to me, let's blow apart precedent. Let's blow apart the old way of doing things. Let's break all the rules. What could go wrong? Well, this book tells you what can go wrong and why we can't be glib or passive as these changes happen in the world today. Great book.

Again, in a very noisy, busy world, Cal Newport's slow productivity, his thoughts on technology, his thoughts of systems and routines. I sat with him here at this table and interviewed him about this book when it came out. But really important great book on how you get things done. It's not by doing lots of things. It's by doing few important things well. That's one of Mark Shrevely's questions, which I think is sort of a through line of this book.

He says, you have to ask yourself, is this thing I'm doing essential? Because as Soik says, so many of the things we do and say and think are not essential. But when we eliminate the inessential, he says we get the double benefit of doing essential because as the so say so many of the things we do and say and think are not essential but when we eliminate the inessential he says we get the double benefit of doing essential things better so this is an important book this year this book address unknown to go back to uh it can't happen here in the rise of fascism it's a series of fictional letters between two business partners one in the u.s one in Germany, as Nazism is taking over. And you watch them drift further apart. You watch one of them sort of just, oh, I'm just playing the game and it gets infected and it gets caught up in it.

And then the next thing you know, he's turned on his partner, he's turned on his past beliefs, he's become a totally unrecognizable person. To me, this book is a meditation on how basically popular movements and racism and bigotry and hate once unleashed become very difficult for people to resist. And Mark Shulis has a great quote about how there's two kinds of plague. One can kill you, but one can kill your character,

can corrupt and corrode your character. And to me, this book is a sort of a meditation of that written as this stuff was happening in Europe. So again, here's a book written in 1938 that's incredibly relevant in 2025. To me, the hardest people to stay true, to stay good, to not get the plague. And this book was very helpful in me doing that. And the last book I wanted to meditate on,

to bring this might seem like a controversial choice, but that's sort of the point. This is Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power. He came out with this cool leather edition a couple of years ago. This is a controversial book. And I would say if you're reluctant to read the 48 Laws of Power because you heard it's nasty and mean and dark and Machiavellian, then you're the kind of person who needs to

read this book because it's not a nice world out there. It's a world of bad people and bad causes and powerful people doing, as Thucydides said thousands of years ago, doing whatever they want because they can. And that leaves the weak, he said, the righteous to struggle as they must. What Robert Greene does in this book, it's essential service that we have to figure out how power works, how change is effectuated, how ideas are brought forth into the world. It's not just because an idea is right and good and fair and will make things better. That's not who comes to power.

That's not why one policy takes hold over another. No, it's a street fight and it requires competence and no small amount of Machiavellianism. By the way, Machiavelli was a good dude. If you see the spine, here's Machiavelli, you go this way, go this way, here's Robert, you go this way, here's Robert Greene, because he is a modern Machiavellian and actually a good person who consults with

and works with all sorts of politicians to bring good policies into the world, which is the point. Machiavellian was a Republican, like he didn't want Florence to be ruled by a prince and he was Tortured and thrown in prison for those beliefs What he's doing in in the prince what Robert is also doing in the 40 hours of power is saying hey Here's how the world works. Here's how things happen

If you don't understand these forces you will find yourself at the mercy of them There are bad people in the world bad people trying to do bad things If the good guys don't understand the levers of power, don't understand how things work, well that gets us into an it can't happen here situation where those people take power and they run roughshod over our institutions and they tear things apart and they use their power to harm people. Power has to be checked against power and you're not doing yourself any favors by being this pure-hearted decent activist who doesn't want to get their hands dirty. You've got to get your hands dirty. You've got to understand how not just things work but have always worked. That's what the 48

laws of power is about and that's why we need more people than ever to read it this year to be a check against the people who intuitively know how power works or who have already read this book and are using it for ill purposes. So definitely read the 48 Laws of Power this year too. So anyways, this isn't a conclusive list of books you have to read this year but it is some books that you would do well to read this year. If you just read these books or if you just read a couple of these books that would be a great year of reading. I know you can't go wrong reading any of these books. I hope you read them and many more.

I have a whole bookstore on the other side of this wall filled with other books that I also recommend, of course, but this is a good start and I hope these books will help you get through 2025. I know they helped me get through 2024 and many other difficult years in my life. If you don't get my reading list email, it's I think the best thing that I do. I've been sending out every month for almost 15 years. I've recommended hundreds of books to people all over the world. I even built my own bookstore around this, but you can get the list totally for free. No spam, just awesome book recommendations once a month at ryanholiday.net slash reading

list or click the link below. 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. Shopping local might seem like a tough cookie. But truthfully, finding Ontario made products is a piece of cake. That's why support Ontario made dot ca exists. With over 17,000 products listed, everything from cars to

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