Ask Daily Stoic: How Does a Stoic Deal with Aggressive People?

Ryan talks about the new Daily Stoic offices, reads a selection from The Obstacle is the Way, and answers your questions. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Hey there, it's Ryan Holiday. I am sitting here in the new Daily Stoic offices. I don't want to spoil that too much, because a bunch is coming related to that, but we are in the process of setting up our new office. My desk is here, and one of the first things I put at the desk, I'm staring at it right now, is a small bust I have of Marcus Aurelius. It was, I think I bought this right before I started writing The Obstacle is the Way. It was made in 1820 out of Carrara marble. And when I sort of sit and write, it catches my eye. And one of the things I like to think about it is that somebody

• 1:10Ryan Holiday?

  made this 200 years ago, and I think about whose desk it's probably sat on, or, you know, somewhere in someone's house that it sat, what it meant to them, how many generations of people 200 years is, and at the same time, how instantaneous that is. And actually, as I was sitting here thinking I was gonna talk to you guys about this, I looked up an email that we'd written when I first started the Daily Stoic Daily email, and it turned out I wrote this in October 2016. So four years have passed even since then. Like, when I was writing it, I was like, you know, 1820, that's almost 200 years. But even, you know,

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  four years have passed since then. So time is this sort of force that's like, you know, tick ticking away, and yet, these sort of certain ideas or examples...

• 2:05Ryan Holiday?

  Or people kind of stand eternal. And I think, to me, that's why I have it on my desk. That's what I love about it. That's why it's sort of served as good inspiration for the writing. And, and there's a passage from Matthew Arnold that I really love. We've used it a bunch of times. But he says, "Long after his death, his bust," and it's Marcus Aurelius, "was to be seen in the houses of private men through the wide Roman Empire. It may be the vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the semblance and doings of living sovereigns. It is the nobler part which busies itself with those of the dead. These busts of Marcus Aurelius in the homes of Gaul,

• 2:45Ryan Holiday?

  Britain and Italy bear witness, not to the intimate frivolous curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of the passage of a great man upon the earth." And when I look at that small bust of Marcus Aurelius, I try to make sure that my actions honor his memory. I try to think that I want the writing that I do to live up to that example. And yeah, this is just this sort of timeless Stoic practice, the importance of finding examples or exemplars. As Seneca said, "Choosing yourself a Cato and then displaying their presence in the places that you frequent." And so actually behind this little one, the one I have is maybe

• 3:27Ryan Holiday?

  about four inches tall. I also have a much, much larger bust that E. S. Schubert gave me. He's the artist we worked with on the Marcus Aurelius bust we made for Daily Stoic, but he gave me a, a big one. It's like, it's not quite life size, but you know, I bet his, his head's about the size of a cantaloupe. And this thing is heavy. It's made of pewter and bronze, I think. It's big. And so I, I have them both now on my desk. They're like sort of the most prominent things. I try to keep kind of generally an, an empty desk, but I have this there and I love it. And, and that's the example. And so it's something we've written about. Obviously, we sell our version of the statue in the Daily Stoic store, but what I wanted to talk about this is I really do think the idea is important. Who are your heroes?

• 4:12Ryan Holiday?

  What do you have up on the wall? How is that example sort of living in your daily life? And actually, sort of on the other side of my desk, on the wall, the first picture that I put up is a picture that the painter Garland Robinette, he was a broadcaster in New Orleans. He became a friend of mine after I wrote, Trust Me, I'm Lying, that he painted for me. It's like a juju doll. So it's a sort of New Orleans like voodoo doll character. And then inside of it, it's a picture of one of my favorite writers, the novelist Walker Percy, who happened to be a fan of Stoicism. And so as I'm decorating this office, as I'm setting up what I'm going to look at on a daily basis as I come to work and write, I want the ideas and the ideals and the people I admire

• 4:55Ryan Holiday?

  to be embodied in some tangible form. And as I've gone around to give talks and meet with interesting people over the world, that is something that I found that they all have in common. If you speak at a sports team, they got the cultural values on the wall. They got jerseys of the people who, you know, who've gone pro or whose jerseys have been retired. You know, they are holding up the examples of the people they admire and believe in. And that's something I believe in. And then I just wanted to pass along to you guys. So we'll get right into it.

• 5:27Ryan Holiday?

  Today's reading is a little passage from The Obstacle is the Way. It's actually from the Discipline of the Action section, one of my favorite chapters. This is on Amelia Earhart. It's about getting up and getting moving and getting started. Amelia Earhart wanted to be a great aviator, but it was the 1920s and people still thought that women were frail and weak and didn't have the stuff. Women's suffrage was not even a decade old. She couldn't make her living as a pilot, so she took a job as a social worker. Then one day, the phone rang. The man on the line had a pretty offensive proposition along the lines of, "We have someone willing to fund the first female transatlantic flight. Our first choice is already backed out.

• 6:12Ryan Holiday?

  You won't actually get to fly the plane and we're going to send two men along as chaperones. And guess what? We'll pay them a lot of money and you won't get anything. Oh, and you might very..." Well die doing it. Do you know what she said to that offer? She said, yes, because that's what people who defy the odds do. That's how people who become great at things, whether it's flying or blowing through gender stereotypes do. They start anywhere, anyhow. They don't care if the conditions are perfect or if they're being slated, because they know that once they get started, if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work. And that's how it went for Amelia Earhart. Less than five years later, she was the first woman to fly solo, nonstop across the Atlantic

• 6:54Ryan Holiday?

  and became rightly one of the most famous and respected people in the world. But none of that would have happened had she turned up her nose at that offensive offer or sat around feeling sorry for itself. None of it could have happened if she'd stopped after that first accomplishment either. What mattered was that she took the opening and pressed ahead. That was the reason for her success. Life can be frustrating. Oftentimes, we know what our problems are. We may even know what to do about them. But we fear that taking action is too risky, that we don't have the experience, or that's not how we pictured it, or because it's too expensive, because it's too soon, because we think something better might come along, because it might not work. And you know what happens as a result? Nothing. We do nothing.

• 7:37Ryan Holiday?

  Tell yourself that the time for that has passed. The wind is rising. The bell's been rung. Get started. Get moving. We often assume that the world moves at our leisure. We delay when we should initiate. We jog when we should be running, or better yet, sprinting. And then we're shocked, shocked when nothing big ever happens, when opportunities never show up, when new obstacles begin to pile up, or the enemies finally get their act together. Of course, they did. We gave them room to breathe. We gave them a chance. So the first step is to take the bat off your shoulder and give it a swing. You've got to start to go anywhere. For some reason, these days, we tend to downplay the importance of aggression, of taking risks, of barreling forward, of compromise.

• 8:21Ryan Holiday?

  It's probably because it's been negatively associated with certain notions of violence or masculinity. But of course, Earhart shows that that isn't true. In fact, on the side of her plane, she painted the words, "Always think with your stick forward." That is, you can't ever let up your flying speed. If you do, you crash. Be deliberate, of course, but you always need to be moving forward. You can listen to the audiobook of The Obstacle is the Way. It's available on Amazon. Tim Ferriss was actually nice enough to be the one who published it. I did the reading. But it is a great book if you want to check it out. What I think is always interesting about this passage is I tell us this version of the story in a lot of the talks that I give. And I remember I was giving a talk in San Francisco at a tech startup and I told the

• 9:06Ryan Holiday?

  story of Amelia Earhart. And afterwards, on Twitter, which I shouldn't have been, but I saw this woman who'd been in the audience got very, very upset that I told this story. She had somehow taken the message from this story that, that women should just take what's offered to them, that this was somehow a story about settling, which to me, it's the exact opposite of it. And I think sort of it's kind of emblematic of the exact mentality that I was trying to attack in the thing that I think that Amelia Earhart so wonderfully embodies, which is that you can't make progress if you don't get started, if you wait for the perfect opportunity, if you wait to be treated fairly. You have to take what you want in this life. You have to take what's yours.

• 9:49Ryan Holiday?

  And, and we are indebted to people like Amelia Earhart, to people who have that sort of stoic ability to endure slights and disrespect, the way that Jackie Robinson did, the way that Amelia Earhart did, and are willing to take an inch, turn it into a mile, and prove just how wrong the vast majority of people have been. And, and that requires, I think, what the message of that section of the book is about, which is about taking action, doing the work, getting momentum, and then, as Amelia Earhart said, always thinking with your stick forward. That means progress, not perfection. So get out there, get moving.

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. You ask your questions, we answer them. You send them in at [email protected]. How does a stoic deal with aggressive people? Or how should we respond to sort of bad, evil, mean, unpleasant people? I don't think the Stoics had any illusions about, you know, their fellow man. Marcus Aurelius talks about, you know, he opens Book Two of Meditations with sort of a meditation on how awful some of the people he's going to meet today. But, but later in the books, he talks about How, look, there are going to be people who gouge and bite you in the ring, who cheat, and you can choose to be upset by this, you could choose to be frustrated by this,

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  or you could understand that that's like, kind of a certain type of person in the world, and that you have to keep your guard up around them, you have to adjust your fight strategy accordingly. But you can't let it get to you, and you certainly can't make it, let it make you quit. And so Marcus Aurelius led the Roman army in war. Marcus Aurelius would have sentenced people to death, he would have, you know, adjudicated very complicated, unpleasant legal cases with examples of humanity doing awful things to each other. So there's a sort of pragmatism and a realism in Stoicism in a sense that what has to be done, has to be done. You know, Marcus Aurelius talks about wrestling and fighting and boxing, but I don't think he just meant in the sort of confines of the ring.

• 12:01Ryan Holiday?

  It's like, look, sometimes, you know, violence is necessary. We worked on this book at Brashcheck a couple of years ago, it's a guy named Tim Larkin, and he said, and I'm getting a little bit away from a question, but I think it's worth pursuing, because the Stoics were not utopians, they were, they not believed that everyone was good, and that everyone would be nice. But Tim Larkin's great line, he says, you know, "Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is the answer, it's the only answer." And I think that kind of encapsulates the Stoic approach, which is that you try to be good, you try to give people the benefit of the doubt, you try to do the right thing always. But sometimes shit gets real, and sometimes that is required.

• 12:42Ryan Holiday?

  That, you know, thankfully, we live in a society today where we have a volunteer army rather than a, you know, a general citizens army. And so people have taken it upon themselves to sort of do those things for us. We have police, you know, we have authorities, we have government agencies that sort of step in between us and some of the things that, you know, in earlier times, we would have had to handle ourselves. But I guess my answer to this question in sort of long windy ways is that you deal with aggressive people as they are required to be dealt with. You always try to comport yourself with the standards that you believe, and you try to do the right thing, and then, you know, sometimes, sometimes you gotta do more than that.

• 13:24Ryan Holiday?

  Jeremiah's question is if I had any suggestions for applying Stoicism to learning a foreign language that he wants to learn Japanese to speak with his children and he has motivations, but he doesn't enjoy the process of learning. It's very boring, difficult, and how can I use Stoicism to overcome this? First off, good for you. I think this is a great question. I think you're wonderful for trying to do what you're doing. I am not good at languages. I speak mediocre Spanish, but I have liked using Duolingo. I'm actually using Duolingo right now to try to learn some Latin. It's something I thought would sort of improve my game as a writer and a

• 14:05Ryan Holiday?

  thinker this year if I could be closer to understanding some of the languages that right now I only sort of hear about and experience secondhand. I found the sort of gamification of the app to be fun and beneficial. So I might just look at, you know, sort of different people who have experimented with different strategies for learning. I guess sometimes people go like, oh, like as an example, we found with books, it's like, I love books. Books come easy to me. I think reading is easy. I love the smell and the touch and the feel of a book. But what we realized is that not everyone feels the same way. That's why we do this podcast. That's why we make the YouTube videos. That's why we have the Instagram account. And so sometimes we can assume that things should only be

• 14:46Ryan Holiday?

  done a certain way, and then we're just supposed to grit our teeth and sort of white-knuckle through a difficult process. Maybe there's different learning methodologies that you should check out. Maybe it's Duolingo. Maybe it's hiring a tutor. Maybe it's taking classes. Maybe it's spending time in Japan. I don't know what it is, but I think one of the things, like, experiment. Try. Put yourself out there. Take some risks. Don't just think that sheer effort is the only way to get through this. The Stoics were big on tutors. Obviously, I think each one of the Stoics, the famous Stoics, has a pretty well-known tutor. And so maybe thinking about, yeah, investing in someone to guide you through this process. Who's your master? Who's your instructor? Just doing it alone might be where you're struggling. And then the last thing I would

• 15:31Ryan Holiday?

  think about is don't just think about that you're learning alone. Language. Think about how you're learning to teach yourself new things, how you're learning to be a better father, how you're learning to be a better person. Also, sort of give yourself credit for the process that you're going through. And that, yeah, it's supposed to be hard, but that's because you're you're learning two skills at the same time. You're learning to speak Japanese, but you're also learning how to learn Japanese, which for you may actually be the harder thing. So that's just maybe an interesting way to think about it. Pranay is asking, what kind of meditation can one practice in order to become more calm and resilient? Can you elaborate on the role of meditation and mindfulness? So you might think as someone who wrote a book called Stillness is the Key, that I'm very much that I'm a big meditator.

• 16:16Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not. I struggle with it. It doesn't really do that much for me. For me, meditation and mindfulness comes best when I when I run, when I swim, when I walk, when I do active things. So that's the kind of meditation that I practice. I can occasionally I'll do some sort of breath exercises or I'll count my breath. I like to do it sets of 30. I count one, two, three, up to 30. I start over and over again. Sometimes I'll do that like when I'm in a steam room or a sauna. It feels very sort of Greek and Roman to me. This is, you know, we know the Stoics spent a lot of time in these baths. But I would just experiment with the different apps. Calm.com is great. There's different apps that you can try and work with. But if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There's other ways to do it.

• 16:58Ryan Holiday?

  I would just I would just think about the Stoics and that they never used the word meditation. When Marcus Rilis calls his book Meditations, or that's the name, it wasn't thinking about meditation in our context. He was thinking about a conversation with himself. So journaling is that form of meditation for Marcus Rilis, it seems. You know, Seneca talks about his nightly review. Cato seemed to have these kind of long flowing conversations in dinner parties. Other Stoics spent time alone reading or or time hunting or time doing lots of different things. So I'm always reluctant to say meditation is this one thing. You should do it this way. I don't think that's the Stoic tradition. And so I'm just reluctant to to fit you in that box if it's not working for you.

• 17:40Ryan Holiday?

  So another question we have here is how to properly apologize for mistakes. He says, "How do I properly apologize for mistakes I have committed and the wrongdoings that had an impact on a person's life, which were committed either intentionally or unintentionally before I was introduced to Stoicism?" I mean, this seems pretty straightforward to me. You apologize, you mean it sincerely, you actually take some time to think about how this affected another person. You don't think about how it affected you, you don't think about why you did it, you think about how it affected that other person, how that must have felt to be them. And you apologize, and you address that, and you mean it. And then you have to understand that all you can do is offer the apology.

• 18:21Ryan Holiday?

  You can't make them accept it, you can't make them forgive you, and it's not fair for you to demand or expect those things. All you can do is give a heartfelt expression of your feelings, give them a commitment of how you want to do better in the future, the path that you're on, what's been learned from this process, and hope that they accept it, and ultimately give them the space to accept it. That's really all that you can do. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. And if you don't get the Daily Stoic email, go to dailystoic.com/email.