Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today.

Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life.

Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoke.com.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. It's crazy for me to wrap my head around the fact that four years ago, exactly, we were just launching the Daily Stoke website and we were slipping

the Daily Stoke, the book out into the universe. I had just put out, you go as the enemy in the summer and the book was sort of an experiment. We weren't sure how it was going to work. People would like it. Stoicism as a trend was not nearly what it is now.

Of course, we were just coming up on the election and no one knew what was going to happen. My wife was very, very pregnant.

Of all the books I put out, that one sort of had the least fanfare. We just put it out into the world and wanted to see what happened. It's been this incredible journey in the four years that have happened since I have two kids.

I've written other books, I've seen and experienced all sorts of things that just as you have it, four years seems like an eternity. And here we are in 2020. And by the time you are listening to this, although when I'm recording it, it's not yet happened.

Lies of the Stoics will be out in the world, sort of a sequel to Daily Stoke, but another collaboration with Steve Hanselman and myself, as we've talked about before, the premise of the book is, okay, if the Daily Stoke is one thought from the Stoics every day.

Well, let's actually look at who these people were. How do they live up to the philosophy? How did Stoicism actually help them day to day? And what can we learn from their lives? It's not just biography, but what can we learn from the moments, the critical moments of their lives where they made good decisions or bad decisions, whether they lived up to the philosophy or didn't live up to the philosophy? And how can that inspire and teach us?

But what I thought I'd kick around a little bit this morning is maybe document it because it's a weird moment. Like, you know, the book is done. There's nothing else I can do. And this is how all creative projects are at a certain point, like the ship has sailed. They've already been printed. They've gone out to stores. The marketing campaign is done. The release data set.

And then it's just sort of like out of your hands. And it's a really weird feeling. It's an exercise in that sort of powerlessness that the Stoics talk about where you have to sort of let go and let God as the expression goes. You realize you control the effort. I've controlled everything I've put in up to this point.

And then whether people like it, whether it sells well, whether it gets the media attention, you know, it's not up to you. And this is a really, this is a thing you have to remind yourself of constantly. If the fact that Daily Stoic came out and has sold, you know, a million plus copies, it's translated in all these languages that we're having this conversation right now. The fact that that's happened doesn't change the part of that process that was really meaningful, which is the time that I spent at my desk on the page.

Doing the work. So the Stoics try to practice what that idea of indifference like Marx really says, you know, you gain nothing by coming up and you lose nothing by coming down. It's who you are. It's what you've done that counts the extra rewards or the validation. It has to be secondary.

I'm not saying it doesn't mean anything because it does mean something. And certainly when you care about something as much as I care about this philosophy, you wanted to reach people, but you have to detach a little bit from those results or it'll just break your heart. I mean, two years ago or so, I put out conspiracy, which is, you know, a book. I'm proud of one of the as far as writing goes. Probably the book I'm proudest of. It was the most interesting challenge. It was the most interesting story. It's just a different book. And it sold well, but not nearly on the screen.

I mean, I think it was a scale of daily stoke, let's say, or the obstacles. The way does that mean that it was a failure. I don't think that it was and I don't think you define. I don't think you can define yourself as a successor failure based on external results.

You have an internal scorecard. You want to judge your success based on what you did, what's firmly up to us as epictetus would say, and then you have to tune out the other things.

Now, this is easy to say, of course, and it's always hard to do as I'm recording this. We're less than a week out from pub. And, you know, there's news trickling in so far. The pre-order numbers has been really great. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered.

You know, maybe it's in bestseller territory. Maybe it's not. A lot of the media has happened, but then also media that we hope for expected hasn't happened because, you know, the, the election is just sort of consumed the world. And hey, there's a pandemic going on.

I think you can't, I think at earlier parts of my career, that would have been very nervous. Would have been, you have taken it very personally. I would have, you know, been, been desperate trying to do anything, trying to salvage it.

I think the more you do this, the more you do anything, whether it's, you know, play professional baseball or put out books or work in a store on Black Friday, you've seen it before.

So you can get a little bit more zen about it. So I'd like to think I'm in a much more zen place about this book. I hope it does well. But, you know, my identity is not riding on it doing well. And, and I think if it, if it does do well. And right now the numbers are looking like it will do quite well.

...