11 Harsh Stoic Truths To Improve Your Life - Ryan Holiday - #795

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Ryan Holiday. He's a podcaster, marketer and an author. Stoicism is like the hot new girl in school, a popular perfect blend of ancient philosophy, which is applicable to modern challenges. Given that Ryan is probably the world's most famous stoicism expert, what are the most important insights that he's learned about how to apply this wisdom to daily life? Expect to learn why Ryan doesn't talk about the projects he's working on before finishing them, why Ryan thinks that competition is for losers, how self-belief is overrated, what Ryan's morning routine and typical day looks like, why Broicism has found a new lease of life, the importance of taking responsibility for yourself instead of other people, and much more. Huge fan of Ryan's work, I have been for a long time, and this is my favorite episode that I've done with him. Maybe his fourth or fifth time on the show, and this is so good. So many awesome quotes and mantras and insights, and as much as stoicism might be a sort of a meta meme now, there's still so much great useful stuff that was written 2,000 years ago, and still applies to all of our lives as if it was written yesterday, which is pretty cool. Don't forget, over the next few weeks, we have some of the biggest ever guests coming on Modern Wisdom, and you don't want to miss it. The only way that can ensure you will not miss those episodes is by hitting the subscribe button. It supports the show and it means that you don't miss episodes when they go up, and it makes me happy, so please go and do it. Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever else you are listening, I would very much appreciate. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ryan Holiday. I've collected some of my favorite quotes from you over the last year, and I want to go through some of those and get your reflection. Talking about the thing and doing the thing vie for the same resources, allocate your energy appropriately.

**Ryan Holiday** (2:08)
Yeah, I don't talk about projects as I'm working on them. That's just a rule I found. There was this thing many, many years ago, it was this Twitter account that just collected tweets of people talking about the novel they were working on, which they were obviously not working on or they wouldn't have been tweeting about it.
And look, I'm not saying you do the thing for validation. That's a bad reason to do things, but there is some sort of light at the end of the tunnel that keeps you going, right? When you're doing a thing, like, hopefully people will like this, hopefully it'll be received well, hopefully they'll pat me on the back, whatever. You don't want to take that on credit, you want to earn it. And so when I'm working on a project, I wait until I am nearly done or done before I start to talk about it, because what it does is it starts to make this thing feel real that is not yet real, and that you are the only person that can make real. So it's this sort of temptation, this bad, Steven Pressfield will call it the resistance. The resistance wants you to go, hey, I'm training for a marathon, and people to go, that's so great, I'm so impressed. But they're impressed with a thing you haven't done yet. Tell them after you run the marathon. That's when you want to cash in on the work that you've been putting in. And I think about the people that I really admire, people who work for years and years on things. And I just think about what it must be like to be in the wilderness that long, to just show up every single day and work on a thing and not get any recognition or appreciation for that thing, to not know if you're heading in the right direction or not, the kind of character and determination that that takes. And so my projects are thankfully much shorter than that, usually. But you just do the thing. And then if people like it at the end, that's great.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)
I mentioned that quote to Andrew Huberman. And he told me that there is a neuroscientific basis for that too. That you actually get little sort of titrated drips of dopamine when you do talk about doing the thing. So your philosophical artsy wanky insight is also reflected quite nicely in the neuroscience.

**Ryan Holiday** (4:31)
I worked for this guy for a long time and he had this habit of telling people like his plans for sort of world domination, like all the things he was working on. And I noticed that he would tell the story so many times in so many ways, and it was always so smart and clever and bound to work, but he would do it so prematurely that it would almost be that he would get tired of it, right, like he would tell it, it would become real in his mind and become real, you know, reified, as they say in these conversations, that he would, get bored of it before it came time to actually do the thing.