So Much Has Changed. So Little Has Changed.

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.

So much has changed, so little has changed. It's been 522 weeks, some 3,652 days, over 87,000 hours.

More than 5,241,600 minutes. That's how long it's been since The Daily Stoic was published. One decade, hundreds of weeks, thousands of days between then and this new 10-year anniversary edition that's coming out today. Think of how much has happened since then. In the world, certainly, we have pandemic and wars and political unrest, economic turmoil, natural disasters, the rise of AI. But in your own life, too, maybe you've gotten married, had children, moved across the country, changed careers, lost weight, gained weight, lost hair, quit this habit or that one, started this one or that one, experienced successes you couldn't have imagined in 2016, seen difficulties you couldn't have anticipated. So much has changed, so little, too. We're still working on our tempers, still worrying about the future, still trying to figure out what's worth our time and our attention, still needing reminders about what we control and what we don't. If you've cycled through The Daily Stoic over the years, you've probably experienced this. A passage you barely noticed becomes one that you most need. Something you underlined years ago stands out for an entirely different reason. Something you didn't understand suddenly makes sense. You always return to the same words, but you are never the same person.

As it turns out, some of the words aren't exactly the same anymore either. As I had the unique experience, it's Ryan by the way, of going back through The Daily Stoic. I remembered writing the words obviously, but I was struck by how much had happened to the person who wrote them. When I wrote The Daily Stoic, I was in my early 20s. I was newly married, I was soon to become a father for the first time. So raising two boys, opening a bookstore, traveling the world, rereading The Stoics again and again, writing a couple other books. I think it's like 13 other books and thousands of these emails and podcasts. All of that was ahead of me then. There's fun things and hard things, exciting things, immensely sad and tragic things.

Going back through the book, I found ideas that I could explain more clearly, lessons I understood more deeply, passages I had more context for, quotes that I now see as essential, but hadn't even made it in the original book. They just hadn't struck me the same way back then. That's what 10 years of life gives you. It gives you perspective, I guess, if you're doing it right. Usually, an anniversary edition of a book means putting a new forward in front of the old book. I didn't want to do that, so Steve Hanselman, my co-writer and translator, we sat down and went through it page by page, and basically thought, if we're doing the book again today, knowing what we know now, how would we make it better? That's what the 10-year anniversary edition of The Daily Stoic is, and today you can finally get it. It's got 60 new translations, a bunch of new and improved stories, there's new illustrations, there's bonus chapters, there's revisions, it's better from across the board. I didn't change things just for the sake of changing things, and I didn't keep things just because they were popular. I wanted to make them better. And I appreciate everyone's support over this last decade. And if you want to give it to someone, if you want a new edition, if you want the new 10th anniversary leather edition, we have all of that at dailystoic.com/ds10.

There's some awesome bonuses and stuff as well. I'll link to all that in today's show notes. Thanks everyone. Check it out.