Break Through While You Still Can | Ask Ryan Holiday

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Winter has a way of lulling us into bad habits and old vices. Like bears in hibernation we're burrowed deep in our comfortable routines. We found our favorite spot on the couch, our go to delivery meals, our perfectly temperature controlled environments. We've mastered the art of avoiding the cold, the wind, the discomfort.

They call this the velvet rut, and it's soft and pleasant, but it's still a rut. And yeah, after months of being dark mornings and early sunsets after trudging through slush and scraping ice off windshields, it's natural to grow comfortable. It's reasonable to seek shelter in these comfortable patterns. But the Stoics remind us that true growth requires resistance.

Just as seedlings must break through the soil, we must break through and out of these patterns. Nature doesn't stay dormant forever. Neither should we. The idea is that we move with the seasons, and we must face the brisk winds of change head on. And that's what the spring forward challenge that we do each spring with Daily Stoic is about, not quick fixes, but it is about getting set for spring.

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