Go Back And Pick It Up Again | Is This the Life You Worked For?

Ryan Holiday (0:00)

Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Go back and pick it up again. Everyone has a book that changed their life, one that opened their eyes or taught them something, moved them, challenged them. We know that this was Marcus Aurelius' reaction to Epictetus. Perhaps this was how you felt when you read Marcus Aurelius for the first time, I know it was for me. But how long has it been since you read that book that first hit you? Now, think of everything that's happened then, all the other books you've read, the experiences you've had, things that have happened in the world, the lessons you've learned. How much have you grown? How much has your perspective shifted? In his great biography of Emerson, The Mind on Fire, Robert D. Richardson writes about a year of re-reading that had a revitalizing effect on Emerson, enlivening his reading and sending him ranging over further afield. New readings overlapped old, he writes. Familiar books yielded fresh connections with the present, and books from one culture or era became newly applicable in another.

This sort of cross-fertilization happened frequently for Emerson. This year in 1844, he gave it a name, Cozumel, crossings or cross-breedings. It's startling symbols for Emerson were the seashore and the taste of two metals in contact, our enlarged powers at the approach and the departure of a friend. He felt that these crossings or intersections most strongly, perhaps in the experience of poetic creativeness, which is not found in staying at home nor yet in traveling, but in transitions from one to the other. As he tried to court this crossroads experience, so he now tried to manage his whole life as to present as the most transitional surface possible. That word, quasimum, itself came from a reread. Emerson is quoting a French philosopher who said that nature loves cross-breedings. Growth, creativity and insights emerge from this, from dynamic intersections, points where different ideas and experiences or influences converge to create something new, transformative and vital. And this is why we cannot simply pick up a book once. That's why we have to revisit the books it shaped us again and again.

It's crazy to me, but can you believe that it's been ten years since The Daily Stoic came out? Like, think of the life you've lived since you first picked it up. What you've experienced, what you've learned, what's happened, how you've changed.

For a decade now, Stoics all over the world have been reading those same pages, completing basically loops of The Daily Stoic, getting something new from it each time. And The Daily Stoic 10th Anniversary Edition, which is out now, has been updated and informed by a decade of writing and reading about the Stoics. More than 60 new translations. It's got new meditations, new stories and expanded glossary. A bunch of awesome stuff. I think you'll really like it, because again, we never step in the same river twice. That's why we must return again and again to the books that have impacted us.

Revisit the Stoics, revisit the books that changed your life, revisit the works that have stood the test of time, whose wisdom has endured across generations. Give them a chance to cross breed with your ever changing self and see what new wisdom emerges. And you know, normally updated editions, they just slap a new forward on the same book. But I really wanted to go back and ask myself, hey, if I was doing this again, knowing everything I know now, what would I do? And that's what this new 10th anniversary edition of The Daily Stoic is. It's better. I'd like to think I'm a better writer. Certainly I understand the philosophy better. We added new stories, we made corrections. As we said earlier, there's 60 new quotes in there that weren't in the first edition. And there's new illustrations. Also, we totally redid and improved the leather edition, which is really made to stay on the test of time. You can grab all that at dailystoic.com/ds10.

I'll link to that in today's show notes. Thanks to everyone who supported the book over the years. And I hope you like this new version. Makes a great gift. And these are signed, numbered first editions. And yeah, check it out. All right, dailystoic.com/ds10.

SPEAKER_2 (4:39)

One of the questions that we talk about with a lot of families is this idea of how do you define enough? Right? Whether that's in business, whether that's wealth, whether that's passing wealth to kids, right? That's a really big question for a lot of families. And so I'm curious how you think about it and how you define that mark.