From Daily Stoic Weekly Recap newsletter

PASSAGE OF THE WEEK:

As we begin a new year, as we exit another successive year whose essence can be captured with the acronym WTF, we would do well to follow suit. The good ole days are far away. Innocence and ease seems distant. The recent past has been exhausting and trying. The future gapes before us, liable to be still more arduous, difficult, even dangerous. So what is left? Only this here and now. But that can be plenty–that can be an eternity. It can be quite wonderful if we choose it to be so.

— This Is A Good Moment (Listen)

YOUTUBE TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK:

In one of the most watched videos on the Daily Stoic YouTube Channel this week, a little after the ten-year anniversary of the release of his first book, Ryan Holiday shares a lesson from every book he’s written since then. Talking about his book Conspiracy, Ryan says,

“I wrote this book about Peter Thiel a few years ago, and he had this great line—he said, ‘competition is for losers.’ You go to where you’re the only one doing the thing. You have to find the overlap of what you’re interested and what you’re excited about and where there’s not a lot of people doing that thing.”

Watch the full video: Short Stoic Lessons From All Of Ryan Holiday’s Books​

PODCAST TAKEAWAY OF THE WEEK:

In a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, Ryan Holiday speaks with Rick Rubin about his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, why Rick didn’t write the book most wanted him to write, making the commitment to show up every day, and not chasing the latest trend:

“I love music that is outside of time. And one of the things about using organic instruments is, a piano a hundred years ago sounds like a piano today and it will sound like a piano in a hundred years. If you use the latest sounds, the newest sounds, the sounds of today—then tomorrow, they’ll sound like the sounds of yesterday…The newest of sounds can quickly sound very dated.”

Listen to the full episode: Rick Rubin on The Creative Act Part One​

WHAT RYAN HOLIDAY IS READING:

“When conditions are such that life offers no earthly hope, somewhere somehow, men must find refuge. Then they fly from the terror without to the citadel within, which famine and pestilence and fire and sword cannot shake. What Goethe calls the inner universe, can live by its own laws, create its own security, be sufficient unto itself, when once reality is denied to the turmoil of the world without.”

— The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton

YOUR STOIC WEEKEND REMINDER:

Don’t tie your identity to things you own.

“Slavery,” Seneca would write, “lurks beneath marble and gold.” The things we own…end up owning us. Because now we can’t live without them, now we identify with them, now we’re worried someone will take them from us.

Tyler Durden in Fight Club expresses the truth of it beautifully: “You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis.”

(For more Stoic don’ts, watch this video!)

THIS WEEK’S BEST SOCIAL MEDIA POST:

EMAIL OF THE WEEK:

​You Must Do This Dance (Listen)

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