You Can—No, You Should—Forget About This. | Test Your Impressions

“You’ve been wronged. Someone let you down. Something didn’t go your way. This person stole from you. That one lied to you. She betrayed you. He insulted you right to your face. The surefire deal fell through. Your most lucrative client decided to go with another vendor. Your dream girl found somebody else.”Ryan explains why the art of letting go is essential to success, and reads this week’s meditation from The Daily Stoic Journal, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Today’s episode is brought to you by Munk Pack, Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. It’s backed with a 100% satisfaction guarantee — so if you don’t like it for any reason, they'll exchange the product or refund your money, whichever you prefer. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code STOIC at checkout.***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: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: 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.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

• 0:34Ryan Holiday?

  You can, no, you should, forget about this. You've been wronged. Someone let you down. Something didn't go your way. This person stole from you. That one lied to you. She betrayed you. He insulted you right to your face. The surefire deal fell through. Your most lucrative client decided to go with another vendor. Your dream girl found somebody else. Each of us has in our hearts a list of slights that we carry about things that were done to us in childhood, about how we were treated early in our careers, about the things people thought about us that were unfair or undeserved. We tell ourselves that these grudges fuel us, that they have driven our accomplishments.

• 1:15Ryan Holiday?

  And we may be right, but they also make us deeply sad, and if we think about them too much, profoundly angry. The Stoics want you to know that this is no way to live, that even the productive use of anger and pain is corrosive and dangerous. They held as maxim an idea beautifully expressed in the epigram of the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez: "Forgetting is a virtue; memory is a vice." In his 81st letter to Lucilius, Seneca writes at length about how we must always be moving forward, adapting, rather than reacting. "Even after a poor crop," Seneca illustrates, "one should sow again, for often losses

• 1:57Ryan Holiday?

  due to continued barrenness of unproductive soil have been made good by one year's fertility." So he instructs, "Forget the injury and remember the accommodation." You cannot go through Your life hanging on to hurt, you cannot let what has gone wrong give way to anger in the moment or on a permanent basis, because the damages from that emotion, Seneca said, will always outlast the damages of the original infraction. We have to learn how to forgive. We have to constantly be letting go, shedding off these ordinary and extraordinary things that have been done to us like dead skin. To hold on to them is not a virtue. It is not a vice. Forgive, forget, and move onward.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  Test Your Impressions. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living, which I myself just worked on this morning. I do the journal every morning. One of Epictetus's key teachings was all about testing our impressions, any experience, perception, or circumstance that was in front of us. And he uses a key verb to emphasize this practice 10 times in discourses and once in the opening of the Incredian. And the word carries the meaning of the assayer, one who tests fine metals and coins to verify their authenticity. In one of the most memorable uses, Epictetus compares our need to test impressions to what is done with coins and

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  how the skilled merchant can hear a counterfeit coin cast upon a table just as a musician would detect a sour note. So this week, go through the process of assaying everything that comes before you, assuming it all to be counterfeit or misleading until we can prove otherwise. And you know, it's funny, I think I really first wrapped my head around this idea of to assay or the word assay, because at Cerro Gordo, you may have heard my interview with Brent Underwood, who's one of my longtime, I guess he was formerly my intern, and this great guy who works at Brass Check is one of the partners, and he's helped build Daily Stoic, and someone I talk to on the phone almost every day. And a few years ago, he bought this ghost town in the mountains of Southern California

• 4:08Ryan Holiday?

  called Cerro Gordo, and he's been trying to sort of turn it into this like resort. And he's lived there for the whole pandemic. But anyways, when I went out and visited, he showed me this building, and it's called the Assay Office. So the miners would Pull this silver out of the ground in the ore or whatever. And sometimes I don't know exactly how it works, but they would take it to this office. And this is where like the guy with a brain, the dispassionate observer, the money man, would test it and let them know like just what they found, how rich it was, how valuable it was, what percentage it was this or that or this. This was like the filter through which all the rocks pulled out of this mining town were filtered through. And just because you thought it was valuable, it didn't matter unless the essay office

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  came through and said boom, boom, boom, and stamped it and gave you, you know. Another funny little thing is that the brothel was located immediately next door. So you'd find out you'd just become a rich man and then, of course, you'd go do your business. But the idea is you have to put everything to the test, and that's what Epictetus is saying. He says, "When it comes to money where we feel our clear interest, we have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worth, just as we give great attention to judging things that might steer us badly. But when it comes to our own ruling principle, we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearances that flash by without counting the costs." That's from Discourses 120. And then he says in 2.18, "First off, don't let the force of an impression carry you away.

• 5:37Ryan Holiday?

  Hold it up a bit and let me see who you are and where you are from. Let me put you to the test." And then in Inqueridion, he says, "From the very beginning, make it your practice to say to every harsh impression, 'You are an impression and not at all what you appear to be. Next, examine it and test it by the rules you possess, the first and greatest of which is this: whether it belongs to the things in our control or not in our control, and if the latter, prepare to respond. It is nothing to me." So, look, if you went and got your rocks tested at Siragordan and they found out to be worthless stones, you wouldn't be like, "But I want them to be what they are. I'm going to continue to pretend." Right? You wouldn't spend money that you just found out you don't actually have. So this process of testing one's perceptions and one's...

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  One's facts is a really essential part of the process. You can't just go through life pretending things are what they are, or taking them at first glance, because there are so many factors at play, from cognitive biases to your upbringing, to just misleading appearances. You have to put everything to the test. You have to see things as they actually are. And this process of assaying everything that's in front of you is a key Stoic exercise, and I hope you can build on this practice this week. Slow down, take a minute, put it to the test. See if it's real or counterfeit. See if it's what everyone else wants you to see. Or, as Marcus Aurelius says, "See what is really there."

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoic. It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads of this show. It means so much to me to have all of you listen. If you want to help spread the word about the show, please leave a review on iTunes, or whatever your favorite podcasting platform is. It helps a lot. And then, of course, click Subscribe. That's how we know how many people are listening, and that makes sure you get the episodes as they come in. So, thanks again for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast.