The Daily Stoic

And there is one other book that's helped me and I read it every day.

It's The Daily Stoic by Stephen Hanselman.

Yeah.

The Daily Stoic.

Only because

I find so much similarity between stoicism and recovery.

straightforward, actionable, clear tenets and principles for dealing with the ups and downs of life and becoming the person that you are capable of being.

These are all ideas that I talk about in The Daily Stoic, which is really 365 lessons from the Stoics that can apply to your life.

But we're not going to get into all of those today.

We're just going to get into some of the best.

The first and most important task in life, the January 1st entry in the Daily Stoic, is the basic premise of Stoic philosophy.

There's some stuff that's in our control and some stuff that's not in our control.

And the chief task in life, Epictetus says, is to know the difference between these two things.

We cannot remain as we are, Socrates said.

I've been thinking a lot about this because, well, 10 years ago, The Daily Stoic came out.

The Daily Stoic is 10 years old.

And when Steve and I sat down to write it, our hope was that a little bit of stoic wisdom each day could help people live better lives.

You know, real change doesn't happen because of a dramatic breakthrough.

My name is Timothy Ryan.

I was drawn to Stoicism about six years ago after reading How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robinson.

Since then, I have many, many books on Stoicism and frequent the Daily Stoic podcast.

Ten years ago, I published this

book, The Daily Stoic.

I was 29 years old and I had been studying the Stoics for over a decade.

I'd already written The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy.

One Stoic entry for every day of the year.

But there's a difference between knowing something and really understanding it.

So here we are on the 10-year anniversary of The Daily Stoic.

There's a new edition.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

At first, there were only a few of them.

A small group gathering to hear Zeno teach on the Stoapochyle, the painted porch in Athens, around 300 BC.

highest office in the ancient world.

Over the centuries, Stoicism's influence grew and receded, but the writings kept finding new readers.

In 2015, when Steve Hanselman and I were working on The Daily Stoic, the Stoicism subreddit had only a few thousand followers.

Today, it has more than 800,000.

More than 3 million people follow The Daily Stoic on Instagram, 2 million on YouTube, a million people subscribe to this email.

And the other ones go to, yeah, it's really a 2.5.

So there's one called The Daily Dad that Ryan Holiday from The Daily Stoic started a couple years ago, and I was early to jumping on that one.

I read that one every single day.

I made it like a part of my journaling.

It seems unbelievable, but it's true.

Ten years ago today, we published a book called The Daily Stoic.

And the idea was simple, 366 short meditations, one for every day of the year, including sleep years, that was designed to teach you about stoicism and to help you actually practice it.

Now, I obviously could not have imagined where the book would go.

about to become a father.

I've learned a little bit in the time since, right? Raising two boys, opening a bookstore, building businesses, losing mentors, succeeding at some things, failing at many others, living through a pandemic, writing a couple more books, thousands and thousands of these emails and podcasts, spending another 10 years reading Marcus and Seneca and Epictetus and the other Stoics.

So when Steve and I decided to go back through the Daily Stoic, we asked ourselves this question, if we were Making the book today, knowing what we know now, how would we make it better? That's what we did.

We revisited the texts.