PASSAGE OF THE WEEK:
You don’t control what the fates decide for you. You don’t choose to be passed over for a job. Nobody wants to come face to face with an error or an unpleasant reality. But you do control whether you give up, whether you let it break your heart, whether you are defeated.
— You Can Be This, Just Don’t Be That (Listen)
YOUTUBE TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK:
In one of the most-watched videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube Channel this week, Ryan Holiday spoke at The Austin Central Library about the great tradition of a book recommendation changing a person’s life, the many Stoic lessons for book lovers, what it means to be functionally illiterate, and why the Stoics were big on rereading:
“Marcus likes to quote Heraclitus, the great mystic poet who says, “we never step in the same river twice.” The idea being that when we return to a book, the book is exactly the same, and yet, we are different. The context in which we are reading is different. What we are looking for is different. When they say that we never step in the same river twice, they go, ‘it’s not the same river and it is not the same man.’ Yes in many cases the book is exactly the same, but we are different, we have changed, and so every time I go back and reread a book, I find something in it that I never would have seen before.”
Watch the full video: Life Is Too Short To Read Bad Books
PODCAST TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK:
In a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, Ryan Holiday talked to MLB All-Star Ian Happ about the problems with working on your weaknesses, the power of someone believing in you, the mental side of high performance, getting sent down to the minors and the adjustment that helped him get back to the big leagues:
“Instead of wondering why or trying really hard to impress a coach or the people who make the decisions, I said, ‘you know what? I’m going to believe in myself, put in the work, and at some point, they’re not going to be able to keep me out of the lineup…I was caring more about what the guy who made the decisions thought and got away from my process and what made me a good player. When you worry about the things that might get you put on the bench, the end result of that is always, you do the things that get you put on the bench.”
Listen to the full episode: MLB All-Star Ian Happ on the Power of Discipline
WHAT RYAN HOLIDAY IS READING:
“When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are, Did I show up? Did I try my best? If I’ve done that, then I’ve put my butt where my heart wants to be. I can’t ask anything of myself more than that.”
— Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be by Steven Pressfield
YOUR STOIC WEEKEND REMINDER:
Stop putting things off.
Whether it’s the stack of dishes in the sink, or the novel we want to start writing—it can sometimes feel like there is a force out there in the universe that presses down on us as we go through life trying to do the right thing, the smart thing, the things we know we have to do.
Several years ago, the legendary writer Steven Pressfield (and 5-time Daily Stoic podcast guest) gave this force a name in his seminal book on creativity, The War of Art. He called it The Resistance. “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.’”
“Putting things off,” Seneca said, “is the biggest waste of life: It snatches away each day as it comes and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today…The whole future lies in uncertainty: Live immediately.”
(For more on this idea, watch this video!)
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