Letting Go Is Not Giving Up | The Long Way Around
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Letting go is not giving up. The point is not to make you passive and the point is not to make you weak. The point is not to make you quit. No one would look at the life of Marcus Aurelius, an emperor and a warrior, or Epictetus who came out of the other side of slavery and torture and tyranny, or Zeno who bounced back after a shipwreck to found a philosophy that changed the world and think that these people were passive or weak.

These Stoics, whose lives you can read about in Lives of the Stoics, by the way, along with countless other Stoics, they fought and endured and they built things. They were not quitters.

But you know what they did have to do? Something that many of us remain quite bad at? They had to learn how to let go. Zeno had to let go of his old life and step into his new one. Epictetus had to learn how to accept what was in his control and what wasn't. He had to let go of hope and fairness so that he might fight for many years simply to survive. Marcus Aurelius had to let go far more than any person should have of people that he loved, of his dreams for how his reign was supposed to go.

of his very natural desire to be liked and loved. He could not let grief win. He had to lead through disasters and tragedies. No one much cared for how he would have liked things to go. No one much cared for the feelings of a public person when they criticize or attack them.

Acceptance is a part of life. Coming to terms with pain and setbacks and unfairness is critical to moving forward, to effecting change, to being a leader, to basic happiness. And this is not the same thing as giving up. Letting go is not quitting. It is not weakness.

The long way around. This is today's entry in the Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, written by me, Ryan Holiday, and my wonderful co-author and dear friend, Stephen Hanselman. I am holding a cloth-bound first edition, got a leather-bound edition in the Daily Stoic store, got an e-book, audio, but actually it's only on these episodes that you can hear me do it because I did not do the audio. I'm going to do the audio.

The Daily Stoke, we had a professional voiceover artist do it. You could enjoy this very moment, all the things you are praying to reach by taking the long way around, if you'd stop depriving yourself of them. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, 12-1.

Ask most people what they're working towards and you'll get an answer. I'm trying to become insert professional or they'll tell you they're trying to get appointed to some impressive committee or position to become a millionaire, to get discovered, to become famous, whatever. If you ask them a couple more questions such as why are you doing that or what are you hoping it'll be like when you get it? And you'll find that at the very core of it, people want freedom. They want happiness. They want the respect of their peers.

Astec looks at this and shakes their head at the immense effort and expense we put into chasing things that are simple and straightforward to acquire. It's as if we'd prefer to spend years building a complicated Rube Goldberg machine instead of just reaching out and picking up what we want.

It's like looking all over for your sunglasses and realizing they were on your head the whole time. Freedom, that's easy. It's in your choices, the Stoics would say. Happiness, that's easy. It's in your choices, the Stoics would say. Respect your peers. That too is in the choices you make. All of that is in front of you.

No need to take the long way to get there. It's actually like a viral email chain. You've probably seen it before about the fishermen in Thailand or something. And the Western businessman sees him and he says, oh, you've got this little boat. What if you got another boat and another boat? You scale this operation. You can make all this money. And the guy says, well, then what? And he's like, well, then you could retire and live on a beach somewhere. The guy says, but that's what I do now.

And actually, this story dates back to like the 14th century. It's about a king who's advised by his advisor to, you know, conquer this territory, this territory, this territory, this territory. Why? Why? Why? Well, at the end of it, you can live in peace, although he lives in peace now.

I've experienced my own version of this as an author. It's been funny. I meet these really successful people who do the things that I sometimes wish I could do. They play professional sports. They have huge audiences or they've made all this money. They have all this stuff. And, you know, you catch yourself being a little jealous and they invite you over to their fancy houses and you sit there.

And you go, man, what would be so cool to live this life? And then I find out the real reason they invited me over is that they want to learn how to write books, right? Like I'm jealous of their life. They're jealous of my life, right? And it's, I think this is what Marcus is saying is that you can have what you want right now.

And more importantly, the thing that you think will bring you something, peace, contentment, happiness, whatever, it's not going to happen. It's this horizon that you never quite meet. It's always a little bit out of view. Marcus is saying that we try to get our stuff the long way, the hard way, at the end of this long war, at the end of this long journey, right? It's after I become rich and successful, after I make it, after I win a Super Bowl, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

then I'll feel good. Then I'll be able to spend time with my family. Then I can be at peace, whatever. And you can have that right now. I have this chapter in Stillness is the Key about enough, but it's one of my favorite stories. Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, they're at this party, this rich person. Again, just like I was just telling you that I've experienced myself and Kurt Vonnegut is sort of teasing Joseph Heller. And he says, you know, this guy made more money than your books will ever make in your life.

And Joseph Heller says, yeah, but I have something that he doesn't have. And Vonnegut says, what could that possibly be? And Joseph Heller says, I have enough. I have what I need. And that's what Marcus is saying too. You could have it right now. It's already yours.

It's already there in the things that you control. Having the other stuff is nice and you can still get it, right? I feel like I have enough. I feel like there's nothing I'm really trying to prove, but I still doing interesting things. I'm trying to do it from a place of enoughness and fullness, not a place of emptiness, right? Not a place of having to prove myself of getting more and more and more, but doing it because I actually enjoy it. And knowing that

If I don't finish, if I don't make it all the way there, if just the time that I spent working on it today was all I got, that was enough. That itself was enjoyable. And to me, that's just a much healthier place to live and be and operate from. And I hope you can give yourself that gift. Give yourself the gift of enough because you are enough.

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