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

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

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I'm going to read you a quote here.

Whether you prevail or fail, endure, or die depends more on what you do to yourself than on

what the world does to you. That is not a quote from Ego is the Enemy, although it is a book

I read while I was writing Ego is the enemy because that was a weird book, right?

I'm trying to look not at people who have succeeded, but where people have failed, where they've gotten into trouble, what causes those troubles.

And as it happens, most of our wounds are self-inflicted.

Most collapses come from within, not from

without. That quote is actually the back cover of a really good, very well-known book called How the Mighty

Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In. This is from Jim Collins, who wrote good to great as well.

I read How the Mighty Fall when I was researching

ego is the enemy, as I said. And in part one of this episode, I told you about Jim Collins and I,

how we overlapped on Oprah. But we had a lovely conversation about his new book, What to Make of a

life. Cliffs, fog, fire, and the Self-Knowledge Imperative.

It is a great book. He says it's the best work that he's done in his life and it changed him.

And I would agree with that. I think it is his best book. He said he spent 10 years researching it,

two years writing it. And you can tell in the pages, it is a fantastic book.

He has a little thing here at the beginning where he lists some of the people profiled in the book.

It's a who's who of people I've profiled in my book, people that I think you'll want to know from Lucy Burns, The Suffragette, Jimmy Carter,

Gordon Cooper, the fighter pilot, Gerald Ford, accidental president, Michael J. Fox, Benjamin Franklin,

John Glenn, Catherine Graham, who I wrote a lot about in ego as the enemy, Grace Hopper,

...