How Much Did They Take You For? | Practice Gentleness Instead of Anger

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos al podcast diario de Stoic. Cada día te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, ilustrada con historias de la historia, eventos actuales y literatura para ayudarte a ser mejor en lo que haces. Y al principio de la semana intentamos hacer un profundísimo descubrimiento, estableciendo una especie de intención estoica para la semana, algo para meditar, algo para pensar, algo para dejarte con, para journalizar, lo que sea que te ocurra de hacer. Así que vamos a entrar en ello.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  ¿Cuánto te tomaron?

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  Con orgullo podríamos levantar nuestros balances y ver cuánta riqueza hemos acumulado. Podemos explorar nuestros estates o nuestros logros. Podemos ver lo que hemos comprado y ganado, pero es mucho más difícil seguir cuánto nos ha costado todo esto. Seneca siempre señalaba esto, especialmente en lo que respecta al recurso más precioso que tenemos: el tiempo. "Detente", aconsejó, "cuenta cuánto de tu tiempo ha sido tomado por un hipotecario, cuánto por una señora, un patrón, un cliente, discutiendo con tu esposa, castigando a sus esclavos, corriendo por la ciudad en tus obligaciones sociales. De repente no pareces tan rico, ¿verdad? De hecho, te ves un poco como un marco. Has sido engañado y robado y has tenido tu bolsillo pillado.

• 1:35Ryan Holiday?

  No un par de veces, pero constantemente. Y peor, lo has permitido suceder. Nadie es rico lo suficiente como para sostener esto mucho tiempo. Cada uno de nosotros está en este planeta durante un período incierto pero finito. Y ¿te vas a dejar que ellos tomen de este pequeño montón de minutos y horas con impunidad? ¿Vas a dejar elafe desbloqueado, dejar la puerta abierta? Tan pronto te morirás y te hará ruido el día en que te permitiste a ti mismo ser tan abusado y tan abusado de ti mismo. It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it. The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is.

• 2:19Ryan Holiday?

  We built this Memento Mori calendar for Daily Stoic to illustrate that exact idea, that your life, in the best-case scenario, is 4,000 weeks. Are you going to let those weeks slip by, or are you going to seize them? The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall, and every single week, that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in, that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoic.com/mmcalendar.

• 3:07Ryan Holiday?

  Practice gentleness instead of anger.

• 3:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's easy to imagine Marcus Aurelius losing his temper. His responsibilities were vast, and his job required him to work with many frustrating, difficult people. As such, he had an acute sense of the problem of anger, knowing just how counterproductive it can be and how miserable it can make its users. He often repeated a simple exercise designed to preserve goodwill for others by simply replacing anger with gentleness. "We can't allow ourselves to desert our goodwill, and we must remind ourselves that no one makes mistakes willingly. Each time you feel anger this week, remember, Marcus, and see how you might replace it with gentleness, and write some examples down." This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal,

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  "366 Days of Writing on Reflection and the Art of Living." I think I'm on my fourth or my fifth way through the book. Every day, I do the little prompt. For instance, tomorrow's prompt is, "To what service am I committed?" July 17th is, "Where have I abandoned others? Can I mind my own business and not be distracted?" This is a great... Great question to meditate on each day and write about. And we have some quotes here from Marcus. As you move forward along the path of reason, people will stand in your way. They will never be able to keep you from doing what's sound. So don't let them knock out your goodwill. Keep a steady watch on both friends, not only for well based judgments and actions, but also for gentleness with those who would obstruct our path or create difficulties.

• 4:40Ryan Holiday?

  For getting angry is a weakness, just as much as abandoning the task or surrendering to panic. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 11:9. Then in Meditations 7:63, he quotes Plato. As Plato said, every soul is deprived of truth against its will. The same holds true for justice, self-control, and goodwill to others, every similar virtue. It's essential to constantly keep this in your mind for it will make you more gentle for all. And finally, Meditations 11:18, he says, keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on. It's not manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human and therefore manlier.

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  A real man doesn't give way to anger or discontent. Such a person has strength, courage, and endurance. So let's put aside these sort of gender preconceptions. Stoics are obviously from a long, long time ago. But I think he's saying it's not impressive to lose your temper, to be aggressive, to be mean, to be domineering, to destroy, or dunk, or own on someone. He's saying that the most impressive thing is to keep under the body, as the Bible says, to keep in self-control, to not lose your temper. Because to lose your temper is almost invariably to make the situation worse. Not only is it impotent and pointless and never solves the problem, but it usually makes things worse. That's another thing Marcus says.

• 6:06Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he says, how much worse the consequences of anger are than the things that caused it. And I've said this before, but like, I've never lost my temper and then felt so glad that I did it. Actually, just yesterday, I was going back and forth with this person that we hired to do something, a very expensive person. And they'd been like jerking us around for months. And, you know, I finally laid out in very clear, simple language, this is what I want. This is what has to happen. Stop wasting our time. And then three seconds later, they responded like, well, actually, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let's get on the phone and discuss. And I've said this before, but I hate getting on the phone, especially with things that don't need to be gotten on the phone about.

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  And so, you know, there's part of me that wanted to write this really angry email. And instead, instead of doing that, instead of calling this person and yelling at them, I called someone I work with and I said, look, I'm calling you instead of yelling at this person. Here's where I am. Here's what I want. It's obvious that I'm upset. This person knows I'm upset. Why don't you call them and just work out a solution so we never have to talk about this again? Right? Just make this go away. Solve it. I don't need to get the last word here. I just want this to go away. And that's how I try to solve things that are upsetting to me. And I try to have some self-awareness of like, I know what I'm going to do is this,

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  and then what they're going to do is this, and then I'm going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then I will be unhappy. And this person probably won't feel any of it because if they were aware of what's happening, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. So that's how I try to think about it. You want to catch yourself before you go through it. You want to use it as an opportunity for the next level. I'm not quite there, as Marcus is saying, is try to respond with gentleness. Where is this person coming from? And that's actually something that I talked about with, with, with my partner. We were like, there's gotta be something going on with this person because it doesn't make any sense. This is ridiculous. And I suspect that is maybe they're going through a divorce. Maybe their kid is sick. Maybe they, uh, their, their business is falling apart.

• 8:16Ryan Holiday?

  Just, you, you don't know what people are going through. So to scream at them and yell at them, not only is it probably not going to solve anything, but it, they're probably overwhelmed already and that's why you're in this mess. So take a minute. Remember, it's more impressive to be controlled. You don't have to say, you don't have to get the last word. You don't have to get angry. Solve the problem. Move on. Practice gentleness instead of anger.

• 8:45Ryan Holiday?

  Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. It will take time and effort, it won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out "Taming Your Temper: The 10-Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger." You can just go to dailystoic.com/anger.