This Is a Critical Strength to Cultivate

"Whatever you decide to do with your life, whatever path you decide to walk, people are going to stand in your way. They’re going to doubt you. They’re going to give you bad advice. They will do you wrong. On purpose and unintentionally. They’ll lie. They’ll undermine you. They may well actively take steps to stop you."Find out how to deal with this in today's meditation. This episode was brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon makes delicious cereal just like you remember from when you were a kid—only this version has only 3g carbs and 11g of protein. Use code DAILYSTOIC at magicspoon.com to get free shipping.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan 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?

  This is a critical strength to cultivate. Whatever you decide to do with your life, whatever path you decide to walk, people are going to stand in your way. They're going to doubt you. They're going to give you bad advice. They will do you wrong on purpose and unintentionally. They'll lie. They'll undermine you. They may well actively take steps to stop you. Think about what it means to have a disruptive idea or business, something that promises to upend entire ways of thinking or doing things. It means you're not just someone's competition, you're an existential threat. Why would anyone faced with obsolescence, then irrelevance, then oblivion, just accept that fate? Of course, they're going to put up roadblocks. Of course, they're going to resist. And of course, there is going to

• 1:13Ryan Holiday?

  be conflict. The important question is not if this is going to happen, at least according to the Stoics, it's about how you're going to respond to the challenge when it does. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, "Our opponents are going to gouge us in the ring. They're going to bruise us and butt us with their heads." The question is how we're going to react. Are we going to get angry and take it personally? Or are we going to keep our cool, take note of their tactics, and change our strategy so this cheating doesn't prevent us from winning or catch us off guard? The other critical part to dealing with an adversarial situation, at least according to Seneca, is how we'll behave once we're on top. Are we going to hold grudges? Are

• 1:54Ryan Holiday?

  we going to nurse anger about how we were treated by those entrenched interests? Or hang on to the resentment of powerful people that we felt when we were not powerful? Not if we want to be happy, we won't. Not if we want to be a better kind of leader when it's our turn. "It is not to your benefit to see and hear everything," Seneca writes. "Many injuries ought to pass over us. If you ignore them, you get no more injury from them." And not surprisingly, one of his most powerful essays is about clemency, the power of forgiveness, of kindness, even to people who have not been kind to you. And his point was that you must do what is right regardless of the obstacles and the injuries. Don't let people make you bitter, or angry, or mean.

• 2:39Ryan Holiday?

  It should not surprise any of us that people will protect the status quo if it's better for their own position, nor should it stop us. Just keep going, love it all, forget what doesn't matter. Ignore the wrongs and the slights, ignore the cuts and the bruises. We're the strongest one. We can absorb it and use it and learn from it. The strongest man, the great Nobel Peace winning poet Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote, is the one who forgets the most. Let that inspire you today.