Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

I'm Ryan Holliday. I'm an author. I have a bookstore here outside Austin, Texas,

and I'm going to take you through my office today.

And to show you a couple of things, I think explain how I work, how I think about what I do,

and how I think about life.

The most important reminder I have on my wall sits between two pictures of my kids. Here and here, I don't show their faces.

But that's Dr. Oliver Sacks and behind him is a sign in his office that just said no.

This was given to me by the sports psychologist, Dr. Jonathan Fader.

You develop a career by saying yes to everything,

but you can only keep a career by getting good at saying no to things.

And he told me that there's something similar in baseball.

He's a team psychologist for a bunch of baseball teams.

They have a saying in the Dominican Republic, for instance,

with baseball players that you don't walk off the island Republic, for instance, with baseball players, that you

don't walk off the island. You only get there by hitting, by swinging at pitches. But once you get to the majors, you have to learn pitch discipline. You have to learn when not to swing. And so this is a reminder to me that it's really important as I sit here, I check my email, I'm working on stuff that I not only have to say no to be really good at my job,

but that when I'm working on stuff, that I not only

have to say no to be really good at my job, but that when I'm saying yes to stuff, I'm saying no

to these two people, who I've already promised my best time to, who I've already promised my best

self to. And actually I have another reminder of this that I keep here from the great human cloud.

You sent me this in 2020. It says a little drawing. It says like an asshole. I took him, her, it for granted. You got to remember that when you are saying yes to things, you are saying no to things. And most importantly, when you were saying no to things, Marks Reuss talks about this in meditations, you are saying double yes to the things that actually matter. And I have two other kind of reminders to say no.

These are kind of cool. This is a memo from the Truman administration. It's a, this is this,

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