Is Ryan Holiday Wrong About Stoic Success? | Episode 430

Ryan Holiday has introduced millions of people to Stoicism. But is what he teaches about success actually consistent with what the ancient Stoics taught?

In this episode, I take a closer look at several of Holiday’s claims about success—not to tear him down, but to test those ideas against the philosophy itself.

We explore why Stoic success cannot be measured purely by outcomes, what the Stoics actually meant by preferred indifferents, why making more money isn’t necessarily the Stoic choice, and a revealing passage from Seneca’s Letter 95that raises a larger problem with the way Stoicism is sometimes presented today.

Because Stoicism isn’t fundamentally about becoming more effective at getting what you want.

It asks a much harder question:

Is what you want actually worth wanting?

Ryan Holiday gets some things right. Other ideas, I argue, are incomplete. And in at least one case, returning to the original Stoic text tells a very different story.

A successful life and a good life are not necessarily the same thing.

The Stoics were concerned with the latter.