This Is The Secret To Dealing With People | Ask Daily Stoic

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  This is the secret to dealing with people. Reading Meditations, you might get the impression that Marcus Aurelius didn't particularly like people. He writes about how they frustrate, annoy, and disappoint us, how they fall short, how they fail us, even how they stab us in the back. Not just sometimes, but often. "In the morning," Marcus says in Book Two of Meditations, "remind yourself that the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly." Yet, he adds that we can't let this drag us down. We shouldn't let these people implicate us in their ugliness. Instead of being pessimistic, he was trying to help us avoid being caught off-guard by the flaws of others,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  to not allow our emotions to be triggered, especially emotions like anger or hatred. And then, of course, there is the most critical part of this exercise: actually putting yourself in other people's shoes to understand why they are acting this way. Even Marcus Aurelius's idea that the obstacle is the way isn't about accomplishing grand heroic feats. Rather, he's talking about dealing with difficult people, how each challenging interaction with someone, especially a jerk, is actually an opportunity to practice virtue. It's easy to connect with someone who's just like you. But developing empathy for those we don't naturally understand or even like, caring about them and acting in a way that's mutually beneficial.

• 2:24Ryan Holiday?

  This requires hard work and real virtue. And not just one virtue, but each of the Stoic virtues. Empathy demands courage, engaging with someone or something you don't like or is unfamiliar to you. It also requires discipline to keep your emotions in check. Requires justice to genuinely care about other people as much as yourself. And then wisdom to explore different perspectives and transform that information into understanding. And the idea is that the more difficult the person, the more difficult the situation, the more virtue is required. And the greater the virtue is when you apply it.

• 3:09Ryan Holiday?

  That's what I've been thinking a lot these last six years as I've worked on this Stoic Virtue series. That each person is a chance to practice courage, to practice discipline, to practice justice. And then most recently, it's a chance to practice or obtain wisdom. That's the final book in the series Wisdom Takes Work, which is out in October of this year. And actually, we have a limited collector set of all four books, signed and numbered. It's a limited run of just 1,500 of these. We are almost out of them. If you wanted to grab one, I'll link to that in today's show notes right now, but you can grab them at dailystoic.com/stoicvirtues. Get this plus a bunch of other awesome bonuses.

• 3:54Ryan Holiday?

  That's what it's all about. So if you haven't read Courage is Calling, Discipline is Destiny, write thing right now. And of course, I know you haven't read Wisdom Takes Work. This is a way for you to get all four books, signed and numbered by me in a limited edition set. Dailystoic.com/stoicvirtues to check it out.

• 4:23Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Here we are on a Thursday. Went for a long walk yesterday trying to work through what I want to talk about in two weeks. I'm doing my talk here in August. If you want to come see me, you can grab tickets at dailystoiclive.com. I'll link to that in today's show notes. It's at the Wesley Performing Arts Center. That's going to be fun. You'll have a chance to ask me some questions, as the folks did in today's episode. Back in February, seems like an eternity ago, I was in Salt Lake City, went to a nice rare bookstore, although I

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  got terribly lost because it moved, forgetting the name was annoying. But Jeff Goins told me about it. Then I gave a talk to the Salt Lake City chapter of YPO. We had a nice little chat. That's where these questions are from. I'll just get right into it. If you want to ask me a question, as I said, come see me in Austin on, what is it, the 17th? And then come see me in San Diego this coming February. More dates will be on the website, dailystoiclive.com. Thanks to YPO for having me out. Heidi Fry is the one asking me these questions. She's the CEO of Ace IP Solutions. Thought it was really cool. We'll talk soon.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  How do you know when to validate an obstacle is hard and when to change your perception and push against it? Do you ever acknowledge that something is hard? Or is changing perception and taking action the first thought?

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, I don't think you minimize an obstacle when you're in the middle of it. I like to go into things going, hey, this is going to be tough. This is going to challenge me. But that's what I'm looking forward to. Like, when I start a book, I don't go, this is going to be fun. This is going to go great. Never going to, like, I actually do the opposite. The Stoics talk about actually meditating. They have this exercise called premeditatio malorum, which is a sort of a premeditation on the difficulty. So they want to think about how it's going to be hard, how it's going to challenge us, where it could go wrong. Not because they're going to shy away from it, but because they want to have their eyes open and that, that being naive or being delusional is a good way to get yourself in over your head or to be You know, shocked by something, I'd rather be pleasantly surprised that it is

• 6:50Ryan Holiday?

  less hard than I thought than unpleasantly surprised that it's harder than I thought. So I kind of try to be real honest. Like, I think people think, oh, that's pessimistic. No, I'm still intending to do it. To me, the optimism is like, it's hard and I'm doing it anyway, not, oh, it's gonna go exactly the way that I want it to go. Like, even when I did sit down, when my wife and I were opening this bookstore, we thought, we didn't imagine exactly a global pandemic and a supply chain logistics. We didn't imagine any of that. But like, you know, you plan to have more runway than you need, you understand you're going into something you've never done before. You do want to think about how it's gonna be hard.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  How do we balance a life of trying to improve ourselves, be disciplined and practicing virtues, with giving ourselves grace and acceptance and loving ourselves without constant self-criticism?

• 7:42Ryan Holiday?

  I don't know if I necessarily see the contradiction there. Stoicism, to me, is a philosophy about pushing yourself and challenging yourself, sure, but it's not whipping yourself, you know, it's not beating the crap out of yourself. There's a quote from Seneca. Seneca, most of his writing comes to us in his letters. He's writing these letters to his friend Lucilius. And he's saying to Lucilius, you know, you asked me, how do I know that I'm making progress in my pursuit of the philosophy? And he says, I know it because I've become a better friend to myself. And I think what he means is like,

• 8:22Ryan Holiday?

  a friend supports you and believes in you, but they also call you out and they hold you accountable. Friendship isn't just cheerleading. It's more than that, good friendship, anyway. And there's an honesty to it and a connection to it and a belief in it. That's what he's talking about. And so if that's what the philosophy is doing for you, it's supporting you and but also challenging you, I think you're doing it right. If it's just making you feel inadequate or not enough, then you're doing something other than what the Stoics want you to do. Like, Stoicism is Without focusing on what's in your control, it's about, you know, holding yourself to these standards and then also understanding that

• 9:04Ryan Holiday?

  they are ideals and that we are inevitably going to fall short of them. And what matters is, what do we do after we fall short of them? Do we make excuses? Or we sort of pick ourselves up and try to learn from it and then get better and grow and learn from each thing.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think part of what I have gained from your teachings is just acceptance, right? Acceptance of what is and not beating ourselves up, but saying, hey, this is hard and it's okay. It's okay that it's hard.

• 9:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, look, acceptance is really hard for entrepreneurs and leaders and people who have built things because you're like, I didn't get where I am by accepting things. I get that, right? Like i- if if we were inherently passive, we would have stopped a long time ago or we never would have gotten started. And so there is something sort of forceful and kind of fundamentally irrational about anyone that changes things, right? Because it would have been easier and made more sense to just not.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  I read your book, Obstacles the Way, about four years ago during a very, you know, challenging time of my life, and it definitely has changed the way that I look at the world, how I show up and how I embrace kind of some of those difficult things in my past. So, thank you.

• 10:14Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, I'm honored to hear that. And that's a reflection not of of me. That's a reflection of that these ideas have been tested by an emperor on one end of the spectrum and a slave on the other end of the spectrum. And then between there, you have power brokers and soldiers and merchants and, you know, mothers and daughters and husbands and wives and people who were sent into exile, people who were, you know, thrown in jail on false charges, people who started businesses, people who, you know, built institutions and organizations. And then we're all, they're all dealing with this world that, you know, isn't the way that we want it to be. And instead of sort of shying away from that or becoming cynical about that, they decide

• 10:58Ryan Holiday?

  to try to do what they can inside it and to make the most of it. And that's what inspires me about Stoicism and what I try to communicate in the books. So I'm glad you, I'm glad it stood up for whatever you're going through.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Thank you. And thank you so much for joining us.

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  Of course.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Let's get going.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.