It Started Small (Who Would Imagine It Would Make This Far?) | Matt Choi’s Daily Stoic Practice

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.

At first, there were only a few of them. A small group gathering to hear Zeno teach on the Stoa Pochile, the painted porch in Athens, around 300 BC. They came to discuss how to live, how to challenge each other, how to become better people. But a porch can only fit so many people.

So the ideas traveled. Students became teachers. Books passed from one person to another. In Rome, Panathais shared the philosophy with Scipio and his friends. Cato practiced it in the Senate. Epictetus taught it to his students. Marcus Aurelius brought it to the highest office in the ancient world. Over the centuries, Stoicism's influence grew and receded, but the writings kept finding new readers. In 2015, when Steve Anselman and I were working on The Daily Stoic, the Stoicism subreddit had only a few thousand followers. Today, it has more than 800,000. More than three million people follow The Daily Stoic on Instagram, two million on YouTube, a million people subscribe to this email. The Daily Stoic has sold more than three million copies and is available in 40 languages.

How do we get from a few people on a porch to all of this?

Well, the whole point of Stoicism is that it's cumulative. Seneca advised his friend Lucilius to take something from his reading each day, to select one thought to be thoroughly digested, something that would help him face adversity, handle his fears, live a little bit better. And just as that adds up, Stoics also too has, over the century, the number of people discovering Stoicism. Someone passes along a recommendation, someone tells a friend, someone sees a video or a post online. That was the idea behind The Daily Stoic, right? Steve and I wanted to bring these writings together in a kind of survey course of the philosophy that a person can follow every year. You read a page in the morning, you think about it, you take it into your day, and maybe it helps you catch yourself before you lose your temper. Maybe it reminds you to stop worrying about something not in your control. Maybe it gives you the push to do something you've been avoiding, and then you return to the next page the next morning. That's how a philosophy becomes a practice. But also this format supercharged the spread of Stoicism. There are probably more people reading The Daily Stoic every day, or reading the email, or listening to this podcast than all the Stoics who ever existed in history. How cool is that?

And, you know, here we are 10 years later, and we've gone back and I think we've made The Daily Stoic a lot better. We revisited the book page by page after another decade of reading and writing and translating and practicing Stoicism. And we added a bunch of quotes that weren't in there the first time. We changed a bunch of the meditations. We added new illustrations. We added some bonus chapters. We just made it better because my understanding of Stoicism is better. The words of the Stoics haven't changed, although again, we added some new ones. But what it means to me has changed. And I think the result is a much better book. You can grab the Daily Stoic 10th anniversary edition in signed and numbered first edition hardcovers, which we have at dailystoic.com/ds10. We also have a new edition of The Leather Bound. I just recorded the audio book, which you can grab all of that dailystoic.com/ds10.

Thank you all for your support of the book, for your support of this email, for your support of this podcast. It means so much. I did not think we would be here 10 years later, but here we are, and that means the world to me.

So somebody told me you read The Daily Stoic. I do. Yeah, and then you post about it all the time.

Matt Choi (4:06)

I post it every single day. Yeah, it's funny, because I was going to joke with them, I was going to say, Ryan, I'm sure like I've actually might have impacted some sales because people tell me that they don't buy it because I post it every day and they just watch it off my story. But equally, I've gotten many messages of people asking about what it is, and then they end up purchasing and send me pictures.

But I've been reading The Daily Stoic for the past three years.

Ryan Holiday (4:26)

How did you find it?

Matt Choi (4:27)

A mentor of mine that lived in Maryland, he first told me about The Daily Stoic and just Stoicism, and he's an entrepreneur that I looked up to.