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Start free trial →The Daily Stoic · Ideas & Essays · November 2026
Medal of Honor recipient Kyle Carpenter had just described finishing his first marathon months after leaving hospital. Ryan Holiday responds with what he thinks people really get from doing something hard.
…it's not just like, oh, hey, all the doctors you personally met, but just think about every person, all the trial and error, the people who did it. Didn't make it, you know, that like that made it possible. So at that moment when it happened to you, they weren't like, this is the end of the story.
…but for the rest of my life, I realized after the fact that now I can tell people you can do it. And it's not because it sounds good or I read it in a book. I'm telling you because I know you can because I did it. And that was just a very powerful and kind of pivotal moment in my journey. Yeah,
when you do hard things, one of the things you take out of them is you're, now you have evidence, not just belief, you have evidence that you're a person who can do hard things. And that's a huge gift. Because life is one thing we know for certain is there will be more hard things in the future.
Yep.
Big and small, but it's not going to go the way we want. And there's going to be moments just like you experience in a marathon where you're like, is this worth continuing? Is it possible? You know, like, why does this suck so bad? You know, you have all those feelings and then you realize, oh…
depending on how powerful the mind is. I think, yeah, that's important to understand that your mind is infinitely, it can be.