How To Make It Good | Judge Not, Lest…

Oscar Wilde was the victim of a terrible tragedy and a terrible injustice. At the height of his artistic powers, he was thrown in jail–an awful prison which contained the germs that later killed him. It was intolerance and tyranny, plain and simple. Everything he cared about was taken from him. His family. His freedom. His work. As he sat in that dark cell, rotting, festering, angry, he had a kind of slow but life-changing spiritual awakening. Coming out of his resentments and fear and despair, gifted with some paper by a sympathetic politician, he decided that his position would, “force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist, and as soon as I possibly can. If I can produce even one more beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom and cowardice of its sneer and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee 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.

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:42Ryan Holiday?

  How to Make It Good. Oscar Wilde was the victim of a terrible tragedy and a terrible injustice. At the height of his artistic powers, he was thrown in jail, an awful prison, which contained the germs that later killed him. It was intolerance and tyranny, plain and simple. Everything he cared about was taken from him, his family, his freedom, his work. And as he sat in that dark cell, rotting, festering, angry, he had a kind of slow but life-changing spiritual awakening. Coming out of his resentments and fear and despair, gifted with some paper by a sympathetic politician, he decided that his position would, as he said, "force on me the necessity of again asserting myself as an artist as

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  soon as I possibly can. If I can produce even one more meaningful work of art," he said, "I shall be able to rob malice of its venom and cowardice of its sneer and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots." As it happens, that very sentence was part of that beautiful work, a fascinating and brilliant work called De Profundis, which is full of Stoic themes. He was taking the same path that Admiral James Stockdale outlines in his famous Stoic paradox, that he had to unflinchingly accept the reality of his situation while simultaneously asserting that "I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect I would not trade."

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  Neither Wilde or Stockdale deserved what happened to them, just as most of us don't deserve the misfortune that we find ourselves in. And yet, we have the power, just as they had the power to make good of it, to rob adversity of its malice and venom. And this is what Marcus Aurelius did during the Antonine Plague, what Seneca did during exile, and how Epictetus was able to rise from slavery and disability. If they can pluck out the tongue of scorn in far worse situations than us, then certainly we can. We just need to channel this energy, assert ourselves as artists in whatever it is that we do, and create just one beautiful thing out of this moment, or better, many beautiful things.

• 2:53Ryan Holiday?

  To me, that's the idea of amor fati. This is my amor fati coin. I just fished it out of my right pocket. Amor fati, the idea that we don't just tolerate our fate, but there's something wonderful in it, that we love it, that we turn it into the thing that, as Stockdale said, in retrospect, I would not trade. Robert Greene turned me on to that idea. It's also founded in the Stoics. And, you know, it's one of the most popular things we've ever made here at Daily Stoic. You can check it out at store.dailystoic.com. There's a pendant, there's a coin, and there's some other awesome stuff. So check that out, and I hope you can turn whatever it is that you experienced today,

• 3:35Ryan Holiday?

  even the negative stuff, into something beautiful, just like that. Judge not lest you be judged. That's the November 17 entry in The Daily Stoic. And our quote today is from Seneca's Letters 103. "When philosophy is wielded with arrogance and stubbornly, it is the cause for the ruin of many. Let philosophy scrape off your own faults, rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others."

• 4:16Ryan Holiday?

  And the meditation for today is remember the proper direction of philosophy of all things we're doing here. It is to be focused inward, to make ourselves better and to leave other people to that task for themselves and their own journey. Our faults are in our control, and so we turn to philosophy to help scrape them off like barnacles from the hull of a ship. Other people's faults, not so much. That's for them to do. Leave other people to their faults. Nothing in Stoic philosophy empowers you to judge them, only to accept them, especially when we have so many of our own.

• 5:02Ryan Holiday?

  You know, it's interesting, both Seneca and Jesus have some

• 5:08Ryan Holiday?

  observation around this idea of like, why look at the splint? Why focus on the splinter in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own? Seneca talks about why judge the pimples on someone else's face when you yourself are covered in sores? Judge not lest you be judged. This sort of essence of Christianity and also of Stoicism, I think, is the idea that you've got enough trouble at home, man. You don't need to be going around judging, condemning, critiquing, questioning what other people are doing. And, and I think it's important that we remind ourselves of this because one of

• 5:49Ryan Holiday?

  the things that I think social media does is give us so much more insight into what other people are doing. You know, you see some celebrity's marriage implode and you shake your head. But are you thinking about and working on your own? Right? You think this behavior or that behavior is improper? Okay, don't do it then, man. Right? That's the end of where you control things is. This idea that we should be up in other people's business, that we should be policing, shaming, canceling, et cetera, is, is so often a distraction.

• 6:34Ryan Holiday?

  From our own work, right? That's what I think is so beautiful about Lincoln's second inaugural address. Right? He says, "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged." His point was that slavery was as close to an indisputable evil as one could possibly get. And yet, even there, right?

• 7:15Ryan Holiday?

  What defines Lincoln in the Civil War is his understanding of the fact that if people from the North had been born into the South, they'd almost certainly think and act differently. And if many of those people from the South had been born in the North, they would certainly think and act differently. And so by approaching it with this kind of empathy, right? That doesn't mean that he doesn't make very clear decisions about what he's okay with. That doesn't mean that he doesn't make very clear decisions about what he can change that is within his power, right? He's the president, so he has a lot more power than, say, your average person. But he realizes that judging and condemning and writing people off is not a constructive attitude, right?

• 8:00Ryan Holiday?

  And certainly, it does not make us better. And so I try to take a cue from Marcus Aurelius here. He's famously very strict with himself, has very strong standards. But he works really hard not to project those on to other people, not to demand from other people things that they didn't sign up for, right? He's tolerant with others, but strict with himself. He judges himself quite harshly, holds himself to very high standards. But then he understands that other people are on another journey. He tries to have a very clear understanding of where his circle of control begins and ends, which is what we must do. And then we must have empathy and kindness and patience and love for other people, even

• 8:44Ryan Holiday?

  when they're wrong, even when they're doing things we disagree with, even when they do things that we don't like. We can't cast them out, cast them aside, act as if we are superior to them. We've got to leave those mistakes, as Marcus says, to their makers. I'll leave that there and I'll talk to you all soon.