Can You Get Inside? | The Top Books Ryan Holiday Recommends

Welcome to the daily stoic podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com. Can you get inside? Marcus Aurelius read Epictetus so many times, it became a part of him. Chrysippus loved the play Medea so much and quoted from it so often that he joked that one of his essays was the Medea of Chrysippus. And, of course, it's not just philosophers who do this. Musicians fall in love with songs from other artists and make them their own. Johnny Cash did this with Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. Luke Combs did this more recently with Tracy Chapman's Fast Car. The musician Phoebe Bridgers sings about this on her song Chinese Satellite, which we also have done a daily stoic email about. And in fact, on her album Stranger in the Alps, she covers the song You Missed My Heart. And as she explains about it in an interview, I have this thing where I listen to songs over and over again if I like them a lot, and I have to listen to that song over and over and over. Then she says, she was like, I just have to play this. It's an extra level, she says. I have to get inside it. She said the song totally resonated with her, and she just couldn't stop listening to it. And you could say that this is what we need to do with the stoics, not just read them, but get inside them. Marcus Aurelius wrote about how the philosopher is one with their weapon, like a boxer more than a swordsman. Boxer just clenches their fist, he says, while a fencer has to pick something up. Through repetition, through absorption, we are trying to fuse ourselves with our philosophy to make it instant, to make it instinctive, to make it inseparable from who we are. And this is why Seneca urged us to linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works. Not skim, not sample, but digest till the wisdom takes firm hold inside you, never to be dislodged. I said before that, like, the stoics aren't something you have read. They should be something you are reading. Right? Always. At every age, at every area in your life, ideally, every day, just a little bit here or there. The world's always changing. The text stay the same, and yet we get something new out of them each time we pick them up. And that's what the daily stoic was designed to be. Right? Not just the email, but the book itself. …