Before You Get Angry Today, Listen To This

We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural.🎉 Celebrate Marcus Aurelius' Birthday this month by reading Meditations with us and the Daily Stoic community. On April 26th, 1905 years after the day of his birth, Ryan Holiday will host an invite-only LIVE Q&A to talk about all things Marcus Aurelius and Meditations. Get 20% off with a Meditations BOOK & GUIDE bundle. Join the LIVE Meditations Q&A with Ryan Holiday by purchasing before April 26th! Get all our Meditations offering and learn more at our official Meditations Collection at dailystoic.com/meditations today. 👉 Check out the FULL interview with Troy Baker: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  The actor Troy Baker has a strange little tattoo on his wrist, the Roman symbol for two and then the Roman symbol for one. It's basically three lines, separated by a period. What does that mean? Why is that the first thing that he looks at each morning? What does it have to do with Stoicism? Well, a dedicated reader of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations would recognize the significance immediately, because it's an allusion to one of the most powerful passages in the entire book. "When you wake up in the morning," per the Gregory Hayes translation, "tell yourself the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil.

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil," Marcus Aurelius wrote, "and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own, not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind in possessing a share of the divine." So none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness, nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet and hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him, these are obstructions. Baker decided to get this tattoo after he got into a screaming argument with another actor. They both stormed off the set and went back to their hotels.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  Here's the thing Troy explained in an awesome interview with me on the Daily Stoic Podcast. I could walk you through chapter and verse, how I was justified in my anger, he said, justified in my argument. I could point out chapter and verse, the fallacy of their argument. And Troy said he spent the next two days boiling with anger. But then, as a longtime student of the Stoics, he remembered that passage. Why was he surprised? Why was he letting them implicate him in ugliness? Why was he working against them instead of with them? Why was he turning his back on them? So we got the tattoo as a reminder, and it's been with him ever since, calming him down in frustrating situations with frustrating people. And while we don't all have to get that passage permanently inked on our bodies,

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  it wouldn't hurt to keep it always top of mind and to start each morning with it. Anyways, you can listen to the episode. It's one of, I think, our best. You can watch it on YouTube. You can listen to it. I'll link to it in today's notes. You could also just grab a copy of Meditations and read that passage to yourself every morning. We've got the Gregory Hayes translation of The Painted Porch, which I'll link to. And then, of course, we've got the Leatherbound Meditations, which you could check out as well. I'll link to that or just go to store.dailystoic.com.