The Daily Stoic - This is What A Life Well-Lived Looks Like | Ask Daily Stoic

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

It is, of course, sad to hear of Jimmy Carter’s passing. On the other hand, no one can say that he was taken from us too soon. This man got more time on the planet than any other America president, but much more impressively, he did more with his time.🎥 Stoic Lessons From Jimmy Carter's Legacy | Ryan Holiday Speaks To The U.S. Naval Academy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRYGvMuC2Bc🎙️ 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. So for this tour I was just doing in Europe, we had I think four days in London and I was with my kids, my wife and my in-laws. So we knew we didn't want to stay in a hotel. We'd spend a fortune. We'd be cramped. So we booked an Airbnb and it was awesome. As it happens, the Airbnb we stayed in was like this super historic building. I think it was where like the first meeting of the Red Cross or the Salvation Army ever was. It was awesome. That's why I love staying in Airbnbs.

To stay in a cool place, you get a sense of what the place is actually like. You're coming home to your house, not to the lobby of a hotel every night. It just made it easier to coordinate everything and get a sense of what the city is like. When I spent last summer in LA, we used an Airbnb also. So you may have read something that I wrote while staying in an Airbnb. Airbnb has the flexibility in size and location that work for your family and you can always find awesome stuff. You click on guest favorites to narrow your search down. Travel is always stressful. It's always hard to be away from home. But if you're gonna do it, do it right. And that's why you should check out Airbnb.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. Well, on Thursdays, we not only read the daily meditation, but we answer some questions from listeners and fellow Stoics who are trying to apply this philosophy just as you are. Some of these come from my talks, some of these come from Zoom sessions that we do with daily Stoic life members or as part of the challenges. Some of them are from interactions I have on the street when there happened to be someone there recording. Thank you for listening and we hope this is of use to you.

This is what a life well lived looks like. He lived for a century, the longest living president in American history. That in and of itself though doesn't tell us anything. Seneca's line was that it's not how long you live, but how well you live that matters. And he was pointing out that many people live to be old, but have little to show for it. Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, had a lot to show for his nine decades.

The reviews of his presidency might be mixed, although that's unfair. This is a man whose term was without wars, without corruption, which first addressed climate change, mandated seatbelts in cars, returned the Panama Canal to its rightful owners, and struck a historic peace deal for the Middle East. But his time as an ex-president is unquestioned. After he left office, Carter founded the Carter Center to promote global health, democracy, and human rights, earning him a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In particular, Carter was relentless in his efforts to eradicate the guinea worm.

At a press conference in 2015, Carter famously said, I'd like for the last gu Guinea worm to die before I do. When he started working on the problem, the disease afflicted more than 3.6 million people a year in 21 countries. At the end of 2022, there are just 13 cases in four countries. Beyond wiping out diseases,

he acted as an international mediator in North Korea, Haiti and other nations. He was an active volunteer, focusing particularly on housing for the poor, still personally building houses into his nineties. He wrote numerous books on a variety of subjects, from policy to his personal life and even poetry, eventually winning a Pulitzer Prize.

He enjoyed a 77-year marriage to his beloved Rosalind, the foundation for my entire enjoyment of life, Carter once said. And together they had four children and 22 grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In short, it was a life of service and a life of virtue. Not virtue in the pious, judgmental sense but in the Stoic sense, active in public life, active in the world, equal parts compassionate and muscular, a man in command of himself, as well as others. We've written about Carter quite a bit over the years. He comes up repeatedly in my book Right Thing Right Now on The Daily Dad, and he is one of the best stories in Discipline is Destiny.

And with his recent passing, I wanted to reflect on some simple lessons from Jimmy Carter on how to live a good and honorable life. The first is always do your best. In an interview with Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, after Carter proudly said he was ranked 59th in a class of 840 at the Naval Academy.

Instead of being impressed, Rickover just looked at him and asked, but did you always do your best? And Carter answered honestly that he did not always do his best. And after a long pause, Rickover asked, why not? And then walked out of the room. And Carter would never forget this question. It became the lodestar of his life. Hang in there.

In the 1930s and 40s, the black midshipmen accepted to the Naval Academy all left before graduating because of appalling racism. Wesley Brown was on the brink of leaving when Carter, who was two years ahead, caught him walking down the hallway after some particularly discouraging exchange, threw his arm around him and said, hang in there. Because Carter grew up in a small rural segregated town in Georgia, he was expected to be racist. And so one classmate recalled he was treated as if he was a traitor.

Carter, who ran cross country with Brown, took it in stride. And Brown would hang in there and become the first African-American graduate of the Naval Academy in 1949, and the school's athletic center is now named after him. Make time every day for study and reflection. Even when he was president, Carter blocked out an hour in the mornings for reading, thinking, and prayer. Don't be all about business.

As he was setting up his administration in the White House, Carter told the ambitious staff, we are gonna be here a long time, and all of you will be more valuable to me in the country with rest and a stable home life. You only have one life to live, make the most of it. Carter said that's what drove him. He said, I feel like I have one life. I feel like God wants me to do the best I can with it.

And that's quite often my major prayer, let me live a life so that it will be meaningful." From his mentor, Admiral Rickover, Carter picked up this idea not just of doing your best but doing what was right. It is impossible for me to delay something that I see needs to be done, Carter once said. And this was an attitude that likely cost him a second term. In fact, it was said that the surest way to get on Carter's bad side was to claim something would be bad for his reelection prospects. It is, of course, sad to hear of Carter's passing. On the other hand, no one can say that he was taken from us too soon. Certainly, he left nothing

undone. This man got more time on the planet than any other American president, but much more impressively, he did more with his time. And we can say unequivocally that this man lived. It was the honor of my life or one of the honors of my life to give a speech about Carter to the Naval Academy, which up until I think last year, the year before, did not have a building named after him. So I spoke right across from what is now Carter Hall. to the Naval Academy, which up until I think last year, the year before, did not have a building named after him. So I spoke right across from what is now Carter Hall.

And I gave a speech on the four virtues and the ways in which Carter embodied them. I think that's up on YouTube. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or maybe we'll even run it as a podcast episode. In the meantime, what an incredible man, a hero of mine, someone that we could all use, not just to study more, but to follow more. And I'll leave it there.

Rest in peace. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Back in August, I went to Brazil. Not very long. It was a insane trip. Here, let me actually pull this up, I went to Brazil. Not very long. It was a insane trip. Here, let me actually pull this up. Cause it was nuts.

I was in Brazil for like six hours. I flew from Austin to Atlanta, Atlanta to Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo to Belo Horizonte. I landed and gave a talk five hours later and then went literally immediately from the talk to the car to the airport and flew home. I was gone. Let's see I left Austin at five o'clock on a Thursday and I was home by 1.30 p.m. on a Saturday. So it was a crazy exhausting trip. I got a lot of reading done and I was working

on the manuscript of the wisdom book so it was not all lost. Plus I got to talk to one of the biggest audiences that I've ever talked to. There was like 4,000 people there. This was the Hotmart Fire Conference in 2024. It was the largest digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and innovation conference in Latin America. It was a crazy crowd. And then afterwards I got to answer some questions through a

translator. And the craziest thing was as I'm walking through the airport on the flight home right after the venue, I see they have the Gregory Hayes translation of meditations in the airport. I was like, oh, that's, you know, that's cool. It's like the one with the bird on it and the feather. And I thought, oh, let me go check that out. I wonder if that's in Portuguese. I walk up to it and it says my name on the cover. My blurb about like what I've written about meditations,

like in an article or something, is what's on the cover of this book. So it was pretty incredible. I bought a copy. I have it in my office now. But anyways, after the event, I did a little Q&A with some of the people there, not all 4,000 people, because they needed a translator.

It was a nice little chat, and that's what we're gonna get into now. So the first question was someone was asking, how do I share something like stoicism that's been around for thousands of years in a modern way. Obviously I think a lot about this, cause it's what I do. Yeah, I mean, it's easy in the sense

that you're not having to create something new. I think most wisdom is old wisdom and most great stories are old stories. There's some argument that there's only like five or six stories ever. There's just different archetypes of those stories. So what I try to do, instead of trying to invent something new, instead of trying to act like I'm the genius, I want to find what the great minds of history and antiquity have

said, what's been actually proven in real life experience over the intervening centuries. And then I just want to find new ways of putting it together. So my books, I see as a new way of doing it. For instance, the Daily Stoic is the first time that all the Stoics were ever in one book and that you would consume it one page a day. And then I said, okay, this is a great idea for a book, and it's working as a book, but what if some people

don't want to carry this book around? What if it was delivered by email every day? And then we said, okay, what's a video version? What's a podcast version? We're just extending it out into all these new ways that people consume information. So I think a lot of the best art is really a rephrasing or re-imagining of something that's already resonated

or inspired or connected with people. And you're just finding a new characters, new ways, a new spin on putting that together. Obviously other people can do other things. That's just kind of how I think about it. And then somebody else asking along those lines is asking how do marketers think about creating content and all the different ways that it's possible to reach an audience in that

modern world? It seems like a lot more than it is. You think, okay, there's 10 different networks or mediums that you're publishing in. So if you're doing, you come up with 10 pieces of content, that's a hundred pieces right there, right? So it gets big pretty quickly, but the reality is everyone knows this, like most advertising is totally worthless. It doesn't make an impact. Companies are just lighting money on fire. They make really boring ads that don't resonate with anyone.

And most of them are not even seen, right? So knowing, coming from the advertising world, just knowing it's a really hard thing to be really good at, I thought, okay, so if I'm going to do advertising, I'm going to have to spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of creative bandwidth and a lot of money to do it well. And I thought, but what's the opportunity cost of that? What if I spent that time and energy and passion and budget

on stuff that I actually cared about? What would that look like? And what if I gave lots of value away and I knew that that would create a relationship where you could capture a small percentage of that value and the people who are paying would be glad to pay and the vast majority of people would be getting it for free. Like, isn't that an ideal scenario that you make tons of stuff that reaches lots of people and that's subsidized by

your hardcore group of people who don't mind and Can't afford it. That's like to me an ideal scenario So I just I just decided to direct my time and energy that way I have a podcast editor and a social media person and I have a video editor and I have I have a podcast editor and a social media person, and I have a video editor, and I have copy. Like, I like the people on that team, and I like that it provides them a livelihood, and that we're all trying to take this thing

that we care about, this philosophy, and come up with interesting ways to give it to people. That just strikes me as like a better canvas for time and energy than like, how can I trick people into clicking these ads, you know, which is then designed to trick them into buying something. That's just what I decided to focus time and energy on and it's been awesome. And what I think about is like my main thing is it's really important like what is the thing that only you can do as a creator? Like what's the main

thing that the creator can do that put you in this, what's the main thing that the creator can do that put you in this position to begin with? And for me, that's writing books. So I spend the vast majority of my time doing that. And then the team that I have, their job is to help me translate that stuff in a way that's not time consuming for me, you know, that doesn't consume my life basically,

that allows me to translate the stuff that I make into these different mediums. So I write a book and then the team helps break that down into articles, into Instagram carousels, into tweets, into podcast episodes, like that. And then someone asked if I could tell the story about how I was first introduced to the Stokes, how it came to be that this book that I read in my college apartment, I would find myself not just on the cover of

in Brazil almost 20 years later, but and I don't think I'm breaking any news here, I wrote a new forward to that edition which should be coming out in March. Yeah, it's funny. I was at a conference like this when I was in college, it had this sort of small q&a after, and there was a speaker and and I just went up to them after and I asked them what books they were reading. And they told me they were reading with stoics. I didn't know who they were or what that was. And I went and I bought it. And it just sort of took me down

this whole rabbit hole that changed my life. I didn't start writing and publishing about stoic philosophy for many years later. It was just something that I was understanding and interested in and trying to apply in my own life. So it was a bit of a journey that way. And again, it seemed crazy that you could make a living talking about philosophy in the 21st century. So that took me a while to get there. That's what's so powerful about books and movies and art

is like you make something and then it can take on this life of its own and people recommend it. There's a passage at the beginning of Mark Storios' Meditations, the first book of the Stoics I read, where he thanks one of his teachers for loaning him a copy of Epictetus,

another Stoic philosopher. So this has been happening for thousands of years. People find something good and they go, hey, you should check this out, it worked for me. And that's kind of what I am trying to continue with my work. So that was me talking at the Hotmart Festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

It's always fun to talk. I wish I'd gotten more time in this lovely city, but I've been to Brazil a bunch and I'm sure I will be back again. 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.

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