Your Saturday Stoic Review — Week of June 10 - June 16
06-15-2024
Before we dive into this week’s review, as a special thank you for all the support of Ryan Holiday’s latest book, Right Thing, Right Now, we've decided to extend the preorder bonuses for one more week! If you order copies today, you can still get a signed page from the original manuscript, an annotated bibliography, bonus chapters, and more. We also have some signed, numbered first-editions available, but we’re running low (only 10% of our inventory is left!). Head here to get one while supplies still last and learn how to receive those bonuses!
PASSAGE OF THE WEEK:
The Stoics bequeath to us a powerful tradition of trying. Of striving to do what’s right. Of being willing to sacrifice—in some cases, everything—to keep that torch alit. Will you prove to be a worthy recipient? Will you hold it high? Will you move things forward before passing the torch on to the next generation?
Over on his YouTube channel, Ryan Holiday is taking viewers along on his book tour for Right Thing, Right Now, through a behind-the-scenes series. The tour and the series are ongoing, so if you want to get a unique look into the process of launching and promoting a book, head over to subscribe to his channel! In first video of the series, after his latest appearance on The TODAY Show, Ryan explains,
“For the first question, Carson [Daly], who follows the Daily Stoic, just goes in a totally different direction. All the prep goes immediately out the window, and we just had to improvise it. So when we think of Stoicism as this idea for resiliency, it’s the idea that you can think on your feet, you can bounce back, that you have the confidence, that it doesn’t matter what direction I’m going to go in, but I’m going to figure it out — and that’s what we did.”
In a popular episode of The Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan Holiday speaks with entrepreneur Kevin Rose on the overlap between Zen Buddhism and Stoicism, the dangers of social media, and learning from your “failures”:
“If you’re a real entrepreneur, you’re gonna fail nine times out of ten. If you realize that failure is just admitting that you’ve learned something new and you can truly pick out what it is that you learned that’s new, and roll that into your next thing, there’s always gonna be something to pick out of the rubble.”
As Ryan Holiday explains in this week’s YouTube video, the main reason the Stoics urge us to improve ourselves is so that, in turn, we are able to go out and improve the world. That’s one of the main ideas behind his new book Right Thing, Right Now…
The book is a roadmap on how to become someone of good character, to keep your word, to establish good intentions, to perform good actions both in your own life and out in the world.
And as a natural byproduct of this process, good fortune will find you. That’s why the Stoics say character is fate. Because more than any other virtue, it’s what determines our destiny.
