The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

Hello, Book Thinkers family! Today's book tip is going to come from The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Steven Hanselman. I love this book. I've been reading it for about 2 years now. My friend Alec actually gifted it to me back in January of 2018, so it's been about 24 months and I've read this book almost every single day since. Can't get enough of it. So in today's video, I'm going to talk a little bit about this book, how it's structured, why I read it, what are some of the takeaways that you can expect. And if you're new to the channel, you probably haven't seen me talk about it a lot, but used to talk about this book all the time, so I still love it, I promise. The Daily Stoic is a collection of 366 meditations on wisdom, perseverance, and the art of living. Each and every day you'll open up the book, there will be a date up top followed by a passage from one of the great Stoic philosophers. It'll come from one of their books or journals, and it features passages from some of the great Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, and there are a few others as well. Then the authors will go on and expand on that passage, relate it to 2019 or '20, whenever you decide to read the book. They'll make it something that you can actually take action on, something that you can implement into your life. And there are so many great meditations in this book that it takes an entire year to get through them, but it's worth it. Kind of slow and steady, read one passage a day implement it into your life, reflect on it, meditate on it, and then move into the next day. Start your day by opening up this book. It'll have such a positive impact on your life. So as far as Stoicism goes, this book is broken down into 12 months, and each month focuses on a different set of principles that Stoicism can offer you. My 2 favorite are November and December. So we'll start with November. November focuses on acceptance. There's this great phrase, amor fati, which directly translates to a love of one's fate. This is one of my biggest takeaways from the book because there are a lot of things that we can't influence in our lives that we allow to impact ourselves. So we have joys and then we have dips of pain and negativity based on things that aren't in our sphere of influence. How crazy is that? I look back in my life and I think, why did I let— or why did I let things affect me in the way that I did? When I had no control over them? That makes no sense. You lose control when you let that happen. So after meditating on that for the last couple years, I'm now not allowing myself to put any expectations on things that are outside of that sphere of influence. If I have influence on it and things go poorly, okay, I'll let that affect me. But if I don't have influence on something and it goes poorly, that's not in my control. I have no reason to be upset. So it's allowed me to go from ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs to more of a consistent lifestyle, which has been fantastic. I find more fulfillment, energy, and joy in a lifestyle like that. And the second thing is December. December focuses on meditations on morality. Morality is a big subject. You have to think about the fact that you're going to die. I actually have tattooed right here, memento mori. Which means remember death or remember your own mortality. And what this allows me to do every single morning when I see it in the mirror is think about the fact that we don't have that much time left. You do need to be patient in your life, and you need— you do need to grow and experience things over time. But there's no reason to watch Netflix for 4 hours a day, which is 28 hours a week, which is just some obscene amount over the course of 10 years. There's no reason to let the time fly by. and do things that aren't meaningful. It allows you to help prioritize things. It allows you to look at things through the lens of, okay, well, I need to cherish every single moment of every single day. So in the month of December, you'll read a lot of passages about morality and about prioritizing your time. So those are just a couple examples of some of the meditations that you're going to read about in this book. But Stoic philosophy has helped so many people in so many different ways. I would highly encourage you just to try out reading this book. $20 or whatever the case is, $15, and you might be able to have a positive book that you can read every single day for the rest of your entire life. Nothing better than that. So that's my review of The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Steven Hanselman. I highly recommend that you go out and get a copy of this book. There's almost no better book that you can be reading every single day. Thank you again to my friend Alec for originally gifting me this book. Go out there, read something like this book, and have a great day. All right, bye.