What a Decade of Stoicism Teaches You About Life

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 there's probably nobody I've talked to about Stoicism more than Steve Hanselman. Steve Hanselman has been my agent since 2011, if you can believe that. We met at a conference in Napa, California. He's Tim Ferriss' agent as well. And I had this idea for a media book and we got connected. And that book came out in 2012 And then the way it works in publishing is you have an option, the publisher has an option on your next book. And so as the book was starting to come out, Steve and I were talking about what I wanted to do next. And I said, you know, I think I want to write about Stoicism. And I think your average agent would be like, probably have a similar response to what my publisher thought about that, which is not that excited. But Steve, as it happens, is a big fan of the Stoics. And he actually went to Harvard Divinity School. He can write and read in Greek and Latin. And so he encouraged me and that became the obstacles away. And then it was actually Steve's idea to do The Daily Stoic. As we talk about in today's episode, he had done a number of sort of daily devotional books when he was a publisher, he'd worked at Harper Business. And he suggested that. And so obviously this working relationship has been quite fruitful, but he's someone I call and talk about Stoicism all the time. And he's taught me about it, I've taught him. It's been a wonderful, lovely partnership. And it queued up an episode I've been meaning to have for a long time on the show, which is Steve Hanselman and I nerding out about Stoic philosophy and this process of working on and reworking the book. So with today's release date, I wanna bring you that conversation. And here's me and Steve reflecting on the last 10 years. Thanks to everyone who supported the book when it came out. Thanks to everyone who's supporting the new edition, which is out today. You can grab signed and numbered first editions of it, as well as the signed and numbered first editions of The Leatherbound, which I'm even more excited about. All of that at dailystoic.com/ds10.

You can also grab it anywhere books are sold. I just recorded the audio book. There's the e-book. All of that is there, and I hope you like it.

Neither Steve and I were satisfied. We're just doing an updated forward and just tweaking the cover. We wanted to think about this, as I said, if we were doing the book today for the first time with what we know, how would we do it differently? I think you'll see that in here, and I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. Here's me and the one and only Steve Hanselman.

Man, it doesn't feel like this book came out 10 years ago. Does it feel that way to you?

Steve Hanselman (2:54)

It's kind of shocking to me. When I first started working on the book, and just remembering the twins were like 10, and now they're seniors in college.

Ryan Holiday (3:05)

Wow.

Yeah, it's funny, I actually did a Daily Dad email about this. I've probably done a Daily Stoic version. You can feel other things aging around you very quickly. You meet someone's kid and they're just getting their driver's license and then you bump into them again, and they're starting college, and you're like, wow, when did that happen? But you yourself don't feel like you're aging very quickly. Or I know that this book is 10 years older than it was, but you don't feel like 10 years of your own life have gone by because you're in it day to day. So it's only that period of being away from something that you can kind of see time. It's like you need a stationary point to measure your progress against.

Steve Hanselman (3:47)

Absolutely. Well, one of the most interesting stationary points in this whole journey was, I recall when the book came out, we were just having a national election.

It created such an uproar, and I'll never forget the kind of flood of letters and communications we got from people on both sides of the aisle. People were just searching for a way to ground themselves and to find some peace and comfort. I remember when Debra Messing first posted about the book. It was in the very early days, and she was talking about how cool it was and how much it was helping her.