Why Are You Surprised? | 12 Stoic Strategies on How To Stop Caring What People Think

We have to be prepared for what people will do. That isn’t to say we need to become cynical, but it is to say that we have stop fooling ourselves. 🎥 Watch Why Narcissistic Leaders Always Fail (In The End) on The Daily Stoic YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ4gbvjdIao🎙️ 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. 📢 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 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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Why are you surprised? They showed you their character. They told you what their past behavior. And here you are, nevertheless, surprised. That a boxer, to borrow Marcus Aurelius's metaphor from Meditations, who bit and gouged before would do it again? That a scorpion, to borrow from Aesop, would sting the frog? "Only a fool," Epictetus said, "would expect figs in winter." "It is equally foolish," the Stoics remind us, "to expect the wicked not to be wicked, not to do what they do again, or to do it to us." We have to go through the world with our eyes open. We have to be ready for what the day, as Meditations, Book 2, begins with, "what it will likely bring us." We have to be prepared for what people will do.

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  That isn't to say we need to become cynical, but it is to say that we have to stop fooling ourselves. We can't say to ourselves, "Oh, it will be different this time," or, "But I'm sure it will be different for me." No, character is fate. People do what they do. We should not expect otherwise. One of the best-performing videos we've ever done for the Daily Stoic was this one on narcissistic leaders, where they bring us, how it ends up going, and why it's so surprising to us every time is deranged. But the Stoics obviously saw this with Nero and other leaders. The video's already got 2 million views. It's one of our most-viewed videos of all time on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You should check it out. And if you don't subscribe to us over on YouTube, you definitely should.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  It never ceases to amaze me. Marx Rilis, the Emperor of Rome, writes in his famous meditations. He says, "We love ourselves more than other people, but for some reason, we care about their opinion more than our own." It was true 2,000 years ago, and it's just as true today. It drains us of energy. It clouds our judgment. It keeps us from being ourselves, from acting boldly, from being courageous, from doing what truly needs to be done. And as it happens, the Stoics, who were in public life, who were in the arena, literally and figuratively, have a bunch of amazing strategies to help us do precisely that.

• 3:12Ryan Holiday?

  There's probably no one who practiced the art of not caring about what other people think more than Diogenes the Cynic. We're told a bunch of different stories about him, but one, he's seen begging in front of a statue. And someone says, "What are you doing?" He says, "I'm getting familiar with being rejected." We're told he walks backwards into a theater. And people go, "What are you doing? You're doing it the wrong way." And he says, "Yeah, I might be walking backwards into this theater, but you walk backwards through your life." Right? He was always trying to do transgressive or weird things, trying to challenge conventions. And as a result, he becomes incredibly powerful and incredibly independent, despite being poor, despite being, living in exile,

• 3:57Ryan Holiday?

  despite not having so many of the material things that we all chase. And there's even a story where he comes across Alexander the Great. Or rather, Diogenes is sunbathing, and Alexander the Great comes across him. Alexander the Great has heard of this great philosopher, and he says, "Hey, I am Alexander the Great. Is there anything I can do for you?" And Diogenes says, "Yeah, you can stop blocking my son." And his point was that he got to a place where even the most powerful man in the world couldn't do anything for him. And he didn't even care about offending the most powerful man in the world. Alexander the Great had conquered the world, you could say, but Diogenes had conquered the need to conquer the world. And that's what made him powerful. He was independent. He didn't care what other people thought. He lived in a barrel.

• 4:41Ryan Holiday?

  He wore raggedy clothes. He was always flouting and challenging convention. I don't think we have to live as extreme as he did, but we can understand and learn something from the way he challenged these conventions. You think the whole world's going to come collapsing down if you do this? You think it's going to make you this or that? No, actually, in Diogenes, we see him understand how hollow and silly and nonsensical many of the conventions we follow are. Many of the boundaries we cannot dream of breaking. He breaks through and realizes they don't matter. They don't mean anything, and we have to get past that. If you've ever seen the HBO series Rome,

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  Cato, the younger, largely believed to be the greatest of all the Stoics, is often shown dressing very differently than the rest of the senators. He's wearing black. The rest of the senators are wearing white. And this actually isn't just some screenwriter trick. As it happens, Cato went out of his way to look and dress very differently than his peers. Plutarch tells us that white togas or purple togas were then in fashion. What Cato did was always wear the closest to black that he could. On his morning walks, he would go without shoes or a tunic. He was trying to dress differently. He was trying to accustom himself, Plutarch says, to being looked askance at, to being judged, to being deliberately seen as unfashionable.

• 6:07Ryan Holiday?

  Plutarch's point was that Cato understood that a lot of people feel shame about something that they shouldn't feel any shame about, like how they dress, and that if you can get comfortable, being a little uncomfortable, being different, standing out in that way, that it actually helps you be independent. It helps you stand apart, which is ultimately what makes Cato great. As everyone sort of falls for Caesar, Cato sees the truth of it, and Cato doesn't mind standing alone. Cato's not seeking out attention. He's not trying to impress people. He's trying to cultivate the practice, the habit, build into his life, not caring what other people think, being His own person. And this is an essential part of Stoicism.

• 6:52Ryan Holiday?

  Not chasing the wrong things and in fact, building up kind of a tolerance against the things that other people value or think is important. By deliberately going against the trend, Cato is proving to himself that he is someone who doesn't care about trends. And so when you think about what's popular now, it's not that you always need to do the opposite to be like punk or different or transgressive. The point is you want to cultivate in yourself the ability to be indifferent to trends or to resist trends. So that when there are intellectual trends or moral trends in your time, you're less susceptible to them. You don't just do what everyone else is doing. There's another Stoic, Chrysippus, who says,

• 7:36Ryan Holiday?

  you know, if I wanted to be part of the mob, I wouldn't have become a philosopher. That's what Cato was doing. He was going his own way and cultivating the virtue, the practice of doing his own thing.

• 7:51Ryan Holiday?

  We actually have another story about this. Zeno, as a young man, is studying under this philosopher named Kritis. And Kritis gets the sense that his student is too self-conscious, that he's sort of crippled by this sense of embarrassment or shame, that people are looking at him, that people are judging him. And so he has him carry this pot of lentils through the Athenian agora. So then Kritis sneaks up on him, smacks it with his staff, and the soup spills all over Zeno. And I think Zeno probably wants to crawl in a hole and die. He's mortified. But Kritis' point is that this embarrassing thing that you think is so humiliating, look around. Everyone's busy. Everyone's living their life. They're not thinking or looking at you at all. Right?

• 8:32Ryan Holiday?

  His point was that ego so easily makes it feel like all eyes are on us. And in fact, people aren't really thinking about us at all. And when you realize this, when you realize that the world isn't following your every move, the way that, you know, a mortified teenager might think that, oh, the whole school is talking about this thing that I did. The whole school is talking about themselves, thinking about themselves. That's the silliness of imposter syndrome. Nobody is thinking about. They're all worried about their own imposter syndrome. For the Stoics, it's understanding that people aren't paying that close attention. This is another important practice Marcus really does in meditations where he goes, "Think of all these famous people who were so important. Where are they now?

• 9:14Ryan Holiday?

  Who cares? We think this matters so much. We think that our legacy is so important. It will be gone soon enough." And so what you have to realize is that you've got your own life to live. You've got your own things to be focused on. You are not the center of attention. The world is not revolving around you. People are not watching your every move. And this should give you some freedom. This should give you some confidence. This should give you a little bit of latitude to be not so hard on yourself, to give yourself the opportunity, the chance to screw up, to take some risks. And if you can't do this, you're going to be paralyzed. That's the problem. It's not that caring about what other people think makes us work really hard to be likable. It's that worried about being disliked paralyzes us. That's what Zeno had.

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  It was crippling this sort of social anxiety. And the only way through it is to blow it apart. No one cares. They are not watching you.

• 10:12Ryan Holiday?

  Look, a lot of the Stoics were characters. They were unique. They marched to their own drum. This sometimes got them in trouble, particularly in Nero's Rome, which prioritized conformity, looked down on dissent, looked down even on talent. There's a story about a poet that Nero exiles for being too talented because it was inherently a threat to Nero and Nero's vanity. So there's this Stoic named Agrippinus, who's one of my favorite Stoics. And, you know, someone tells him like, "Hey, why are you being so conspicuous? Why, why are you standing out? Don't you realize how dangerous this is? You're not going to come to Nero's banquets. You're not going to try to lay low. You're not going to try to go along to get along." And he says, "Look, I get it. I get why that makes sense for you."

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  Agrippinus says, "Look, while most of the threads in a tunic or in a sweater are white," he says, "Me, I'm like the red thread." He's like, "I am the red thread that pops." In the garment and makes the whole thing more beautiful. It's interesting. We're all totally unique. We have a combination of DNA and circumstances and a moment in time and experiences. No one like us has ever existed before ever in history and no one will ever exist like us again in history. It's kind of deranged that we would mute our colors, that we would try to be like everyone else, that we would be so memetic, that we would copy, that we would try to blend in.

• 11:39Ryan Holiday?

  What a terrible gift we are throwing away, which is our uniqueness, which is our monopoly on ourselves. And my favorite Stoics reject this. Our, my favorite Stoics embrace who they are, flaws and all, for what they are uniquely meant to be. They are themselves. They stand apart, they stand out, they stand comfortably in their weirdness. They embrace what makes them uniquely themselves. They embrace their true colors. You've done this work on yourself. You've come to understand yourself. Don't throw it away. Be that person. Be yourself.

• 12:21Ryan Holiday?

  In Discipline is Destiny, I tell the story of Florence Nightingale. Florence Nightingale is this talented young woman. She comes from a rich Victorian family and they're like, just live the easy life. Just do whatever you want. But what she wants to do is work and she wants to be of service. She hears this call, like this call to service. But her parents don't approve of the idea of nursing. It was considered a lowly, even a demeaning, even inappropriate profession for young women. And so they don't want her to do it. And, and she ultimately realizes that to, to pursue the thing she was meant to pursue, she would have to break with her family. She would have to break with convention and upset people. And she can't do this. For many years, she can't.

• 13:04Ryan Holiday?

  Do this. And it's not until that voice comes to her again and it says, are you gonna let what other people think hold you back from service? From my service, the voice says. And eventually she does break with them. She realizes that to realize her destiny, she's gonna have to upset her family and break away from them. And that question, are you gonna let what other people think hold you back from what you're meant to do? The answer is yes. Unfortunately, that's what holds most of us back. One of her biographies say, you know, she thought she had to break these chains that were holding them, but it turns out they were made of straw. Like what people think of you, it doesn't matter at all. And in fact, until you can get comfortable being misunderstood, being bad at something,

• 13:47Ryan Holiday?

  being vulnerable up on stage, or in front of a camera, or in your work, or being seen as earnestly wanting and striving for something, you're not gonna be able to grow and change. Epictetus talks about how if you want to improve, you're gonna have to be content. You're gonna have to be okay being seen as weird, or embarrassing, or clueless about some things. Like you can't get better until you admit that you don't know something, right? Think about the questions people are afraid to ask because they don't want to look stupid. So they remain stupid, right? They remain in error instead of admitting that they might be in error. And that's the craziest thing in the world.

• 14:27Ryan Holiday?

  So the reason we cultivate this sort of indifference, this we realize we don't control what other people think, is it empowers us to go do what we were meant to do and become what we were meant to become.

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  At the basis of Stoic philosophy, like the first task in it, Epictetus says, is we've got to understand that some things are up to us and some things are not up to us. And now, again, this seems basic, but if it was basic, if it was easy to understand, we wouldn't get ourselves caught up in what other people think about us, right? Because although what we do is largely in our control, how that's perceived is largely not in our control. We do our work, we control that. We don't necessarily control whether other people... People like it. We don't control whether they see it. We don't control if they treat us fairly or not. We control what we do. We control what we think. We control what we believe. We control our opinions. Right? This is the basis of Stoic philosophy. We don't control what other people do, what other people believe,

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  other people think, what other people's opinions are. So I think about this with my work all the time. I gotta focus on the part of it that's up to me, the amount of effort that I put in, the amount of time that I put in, the intention that I put in, the vision that I have. I control all that. Once I upload it on YouTube, once I put the book out in the stores, once I I publish the article, I don't control how the audience thinks. And over and over again, when I'm disappointed, when I'm hurt, when I'm frustrated, it's because I said that they get to decide whether it was good or not. I made myself receptive to that thing that was not up to me. As a result, I'm I'm handing over my self-worth, my happiness, my version of success, someone else, to something else that I don't control.

• 16:12Ryan Holiday?

  And doing anything in public, doing anything out in the world, we're gonna have to accept it's going to subject us to these other people's opinions. I remember I interviewed Nita Strauss, the guitarist. She plays for Alice Cooper. She, if you've ever been to a Rams game, she plugs right into the stadium sound system. She's one of the greatest guitar players of her generation. And she was saying that, you know, one of the things she learned really early on as a female heavy metal guitarist is that people were just gonna have strong opinions about her. Some of those opinions were gonna be gross. Some of those opinions were gonna be patronizing. Some of those opinions were gonna be mean. Some of them were gonna be sexist. And that all she controlled is who she was, how she showed up. She didn't control that there were people like that out there. And you have to learn that as an artist. Like, people aren't gonna necessarily see you as another person.

• 16:57Ryan Holiday?

  They are going to see you as something to project their opinions and feelings on. And you have to understand that that is not up to you. And if you don't understand this, you will go insane. They will suck the joy and the fun out of the thing that you are doing. And Marcus Aurelius writes this in Meditations. He says, you know, ambition is is tying your focus, your definition of success onto things that are outside your control, right? What other people say and do. He says sanity has to Be tying it to what you say and do, to your own actions. And when I talk to sports teams, I do this all the time. I go, look, ultimately, you've got to understand that all you control here is how you play. You don't control what the fans say or do. You don't control what the other players say or do.

• 17:41Ryan Holiday?

  You don't control what the coach says or does. You don't control what these people think of you. You only control what you think of yourself and what you do. And you got to tune out the rest. You got to focus on how you play. You got to focus not whether other people like how you play. You control your effort, your drive, your focus, not whether other people appreciate it.

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  But still, as much as you try to put up a little bit of a barrier, as much as you try to focus, some of these criticisms, some of this feedback, it's, it's going to get in. It's going to make its way to you. Certainly, Marcus really is the emperor of Rome. Think about all the strong opinions people have on politicians today. This guy is the head of an empire of 50 million people. You think he wasn't insulted? He didn't catch flak? There wasn't judgment? There wasn't people who were puffing him up and people who were trying to tear him down? And one of the things Marcus did was try to get perspective on this information, right? Not, not just hear what he wanted to hear or hear what he didn't want to hear, depending on whether we're torturing ourselves or not. He says in Meditations that when you get this feedback, when you hear from someone, he says, you got to get inside them.

• 18:53Ryan Holiday?

  You got to look at what kind of person they are. And what you'll find is that suddenly it's not so meaningful to, to impress them and not so consequential that they don't like you. We too often, we blindly accept criticism or worse, we internalize it without stopping and going, who is this person? What are their values? How do they live? Do, do I admire them? Like, I sometimes remind myself, hey, these people don't work hard enough. These people don't know enough about this subject. These people don't have the credibility to make me feel as bad about myself as they are doing. I'm the expert on this. I don't have to listen to this, right? And, and obviously, there's a fine line between ego and this sort of insecurity of, of letting letting people in. But I think the idea here is pretty straightforward. You wouldn't take driving advice from a bad driver.

• 19:38Ryan Holiday?

  You wouldn't take financial advice from someone drowning in debt. Why would you listen to someone who you don't respect about how you should live your life? Who you should be? You're letting people tell you about yourself, but you're yourself. You know what you were trying to do better than they do. I guess what I'm saying is that the next time someone tries to tear you down or make you feel small, you should pause for a second, look closer, like examine the person behind that opinion. And I think you'll find, one, that their judgment says a lot more about them than it does about you. And also that you shouldn't care that much about their judgment. This isn't someone you need to impress. This isn't someone you need to take seriously and let it go.

• 20:24Ryan Holiday?

  One of the themes you hear Marcus really is returned to again and again in meditations is how quickly and shortly we will all be forgotten. He's riffing on the eras, the ages of the past, famous people, important people, indelible names who once commanded great armies or great fear or great fortunes. He's like, where are they now? And his point is that we will be one of those people soon enough. And that the things we prize here in the present moment, the clacking of tongues, the clapping of hands, being written about, having lots of followers or a lot of attention, that this disappears along with that. He says, Alexander the Great and his mule driver, the same thing happened to both.

• 21:09Ryan Holiday?

  They're both buried in the same ground. He says, what good is posthumous fame? You know, you won't be around to enjoy it. Marcus is trying to remind himself that sometimes people don't even care that much about what people think now. They want to be remembered by history. They want to be remembered forever. As if any of this lasts, as if it does Alexander the Great any good to be remembered. What other people think of you, it's not only something you don't control. It's not something that lasts. Think of someone who was hugely famous a couple of decades ago. I think about people who had big followings on platforms that don't exist now. And I try to remind myself, that's why it doesn't matter how many views a video gets, or how many subscribers we have on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel, or how many Instagram followers we have.

• 21:52Ryan Holiday?

  I go, I remember people who had millions of MySpace friends, or whatever. And now, if I tried to talk to one of my younger employees about MySpace, they wouldn't even know what I'm talking about. These things are transitory, they don't last. The Stoics go, you're contorting yourself, you're chasing this thing that, again, you not only don't control, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't last, it disappears soon enough. Zoom out, look at it from above. This has been one of the interesting things for me, traveling internationally. You know, you meet people and you go, this is a very famous person here, and I've never even heard of them, and our countries speak the same language. You just realize that the bigger the view you get, whether we're talking about the historical view, or from above, or from a distance, or with a slightly wider lens,

• 22:36Ryan Holiday?

  just turns down the volume on these things that we're hearing very loudly. It reduces the significance of the thing we are prizing, and we realize very quickly that it doesn't matter.

• 22:52Ryan Holiday?

  Recently, Jerry Seinfeld, who was on the sort of interview circuit for a movie he'd done, was talking about Marcus Aurelius in like, almost every interview. He was saying, that's my obsession, I'm reading a lot of Marcus Aurelius. And actually, one of the lines he liked the most is in Book Six of Meditations, where Marcus Aurelius talks about how the prizing and audience clapping, he's like, what good is that, right? What good is the clacking of their tongues? He's like, that's all public praise amounts to, a clacking of tongues. And Seinfeld thought that was not just funny, it is kind of a vivid metaphor, but he's saying that it's funny for a comedian to think about that, right? Clapping your hands together, chattering, you just realize if you zoom out a little bit, that this stuff is silly if you think about it.

• 23:37Ryan Holiday?

  It's nonsense. And Seinfeld said, look, you can't pursue other people's recognition as an end goal. What you've got to pursue is the quality of the work you're doing, not people liking it or hating it, right? What are likes on social media? Oh, great, someone clicked some stupid button. They're watching TV, they're looking at two screens at the same time. They like your post. Oh, you think you're so important? No, this is this, it's these kind of false signals that drive us really astray. They drive us crazy. And this exercise that Marcus does, where he goes like clapping is smacking of hands or people cheering is the clacking of tongues. I call this contemptuous expressions in the obstacle is the way.

• 24:19Ryan Holiday?

  Basically, that Marcus would try to look at things that people thought were important or fancy or worth prizing, and he would try to strip them, he says, of the legend that encrust them or their marketing value. Right? He's like this, this fancy feast. He's like, this is a dead animal. This expensive wine is fermented grapes. He's like, I want to see this thing as it is without the ornamentation. And we can do this for opinions. It was very revealing for me. I'll give you an example. When my, the first time I hit number one on the New York Times Bestseller List. Oh, this is great. This means so much. Super cool. And it was, but Donald Trump Jr. takes the spot the next week. And then it was revealed that he purchased most of those books through like a political action committee.

• 25:02Ryan Holiday?

  And then you go, oh, this isn't worth that much. You think a Nobel Prize is so valuable and important. And then you, you see who's been snubbed for a Nobel Prize. Or you see that there's a me too scandal for the Nobel Prize. The, the point is, take the thing, the gatekeeper, the, the person whose opinion, the critic that you're, I need this person to like me. I need them to love it. I need them to give me a great review. And you go, oh, it doesn't matter at all. They're, they're hypocrites. They get it wrong all the time. They have no idea what they're talking about. See them for who they actually are. See what actually goes into it. Break it down. Now, this doesn't mean you're going to be ungrateful if you do get the thing. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be appreciative if it happens. The point is, it's just, you gotta take it down a peg.

• 25:47Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta see it for what it actually is. A feast is still going to taste good, but there's something about going, okay, this is a dead animal that's interacting with my, my millions of taste buds. I'm in, I'm liking it, but I also see it for the absurdity that it is. And when we do that, it helps us get things in perspective and see things for what they are.

• 26:12Ryan Holiday?

  Look, what I'm not saying is that you should never care about anything or anyone. You should never get any approval of any kind. You should just reject these things on their face. I think you learn this as a writer. Like, I don't let the, the audience say whether I did a good job or a bad job. But I do have a bunch of trusted people in my life. Editor, my wife, some of my peers, who I want to show what I'm working on. And I want them to give me their honest feedback. I certainly seek out criticism all the time. And when I show my work to someone whose opinion I trust, what I usually say is, "Tell me what's wrong with this. Tell me what's not working." I don't want them to just tell me that I'm amazing or that I crushed it. I want to be put through the wringer.

• 26:57Ryan Holiday?

  You have to know whose opinion to value, right? It's not the masses. It's not everyone. It's not unsolicited feedback. It's solicited feedback from people who've proven that they're people of character, that they know what they're talking about. Marcus Aurelius learns from his mentor, Antoninus. He learns it from his philosophy teacher, Junius Risticus. And we see this actually in the beginning of Meditations. All the people in his life, whose opinions he clearly cared a great deal about. And he kept these people around him even after he became important and powerful. And when you wonder why Commodus, his son, goes in such a terrible direction, it is precisely because he doesn't do this. The historian Cassius Dio tells us that Marcus leaves him, the wisest men in the Senate,

• 27:39Ryan Holiday?

  this sort of board of directors and advisors, a kitchen cabinet, if you will. And what does Commodus do? He rejects all of this out of hand and he thinks he knows better. There's a famous statue of Seneca and Nero. And Nero is clearly just not interested in what Seneca, this wise teacher, has to teach him at all. So that's not what we're talking about. It's often what happens is we're valuing the wrong people's opinions over the people's opinions who know better, whose advice is rooted in history and philosophy and virtue. And we're ignoring them in favor of the people who are telling us what we want to hear or who are leading us astray. And so this idea of who you listen to and who you don't Listen to is ultimately what it's all about.

• 28:23Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoic virtue of temperance or sophocrene is really about the right amount, knowing what to listen to, what not to listen to, what to take seriously, what not to take seriously. This is a hard thing to do, but I have found in my own work that I'm much more interested in the opinions of the people I really respect and admire. Obviously, I have to filter their views through my own views and what I'm trying to do. But at the same time, I have to make sure that I keep some walls up. So not everything comes in. Otherwise, I'm going to lose my mind and my bearings. Seneca actually talks about this. He says, you have to cherish someone of high character. He says, you choose yourself a Cato. And you want to keep them before your eyes. You want to live as if they're watching you, ordering your actions as if they'd beheld them.

• 29:07Ryan Holiday?

  He said, without a ruler, you can't make crooked straight. And so who is that person whose opinion is weighing heavily on you? Maybe it's a grandparent, maybe it's Marcus really is. Maybe it's a cautionary tale, like Seneca wasn't perfect himself. But you go, who is that sort of person that you're trying not to let down? Whose expectations you're trying to live up to? I think that's really important. That's very different than just doing what everyone else is doing and letting other people decide what's important to you. Actually, Adam Smith talks about this in his book, A Theory of Moral Sentiments, which is largely based on Stoicism. He says, you know, act as if you have an indifferent spectator on your shoulder, someone who's just watching you, who's not judging their actions, but is going to fairly interpret what you're doing.

• 29:52Ryan Holiday?

  And are you living up to that? Is it going to pass that test? That is, I think, a helpful way to let other people's opinions or let judgments guide you and make you better. As opposed to, are they going to like me for this? Are they going to clap for me for this? Am I going to win new friends because of this? That will lead you astray. But trying not to let down a hero or a mentor or an ancestor, I think that keeps you honest and it keeps you on track.

• 30:24Ryan Holiday?

  One of the tensions here is that a lot of the people we admire, a lot of the people we aspire to be like, they had great reputations. They were seen as towering figures, like Cato is seen as this towering figure of integrity and honesty and courage. Marcus Aurelius embodies wisdom and justice. Epictetus, you know, discipline and self-command. Everyone wants to be admired, respected by their peers. But if there is this kind of cynical streak in Stoicism, this kind of indifference to what other people think about us, how does that work? Well, it's funny, in the 18th century, the most famous play in the world was a play called Cato by Joseph Addison. Like, Washington knows this play by heart. John Adams knows this play by heart. Many of the famous lines in the American Revolution,

• 31:09Ryan Holiday?

  "I regret I have but one life to give to my country," etc. These are lines from this play. And one of the famous lines in the play talks about this very tension. It says, "We cannot guarantee success, but we can do something better. We can deserve it." And I think that's how we have to think about our reputation. If it's essential to us that people admire us and look up to us and adore and love us, we may well be disappointed, right? Because we can't make people see those things in us. This runs afoul of the idea of focusing on what's in your control. So it's not in your control to get a good reputation, but it is in your control to be worthy of a good reputation, to have earned a good reputation. Whether you get it or not is not up to you.

• 31:53Ryan Holiday?

  Whether you have proved yourself worthy of it is. And that's something you see a bunch of the founders come to again and again about this very line. When things looked dark, when they were being misunderstood, when they were being attacked or criticized, when it looked like the whole project might fail, they said, "Look, we can't guarantee success. We can't guarantee that people will understand. We don't know for certain that history will vindicate us. But we do know what we can focus on is whether we're worthy of that happening, whether we deserve that it happens." And so that's how you have to think about your reputation.

• 32:33Ryan Holiday?

  This is actually one of the things when I interviewed Donald Robertson, he talked about this. He's a cognitive behavioral therapist who's written a bunch of great stuff about the Stoics. And he says that one of the most powerful techniques in modern therapy is exposure. He says it's the most robustly scientifically supported technique in the whole field of psychotherapy. That you have to repeatedly expose people, not cruelly, maybe a little more kindly than Kraitis did to Zeno, but you have to get people to face their fears. You have to face your fears. You do this in a controlled manner. You do this sometimes in reality, sometimes in imagination. And he says the Stoics talk about this a lot, that by putting yourself in situations that you're afraid

• 33:16Ryan Holiday?

  of, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, considering those worst-case scenarios, what you're doing is exposing yourself to them, forcing yourself to feel some of those emotions, and it loosens their power over you. And so, look, you start small on this. You should do it with a trained therapist if you have a serious issue. I'm not a therapist, so I'm not giving you this advice. What I'm saying, and what the Stoics have said, is the things that we are unfamiliar with, the things that we allow to loom large over us, the things that we don't actually directly experience, they have too much power over us. And oftentimes, other people's opinions, potentially mortifying, embarrassing, uncomfortable situations, they become big and powerful over us because we are so unfamiliar with them.

• 34:02Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoic path, it's not becoming so thick-skinned that you don't give a shit about anything or anyone, but it is reminding yourself what's in your control. What's up to you and what's not up to you. What's up to you is you, and what's not up to you isn't worth thinking about so much. Ask yourself, is this opinion that I am weighing, is it wise? Is the person who is offering it, are they skilled where I'm trying to improve? Do they live by principles I admire? Would I trade places with them? Is this opinion something I can influence or act on? Will I be glad that I cared about this in five years, or 10 years, or 20 years? Let the answers to these questions guide you whether you should care about this thing or not.

• 34:48Ryan Holiday?

  Every day, I send out one Stoic-inspired email totally for free to almost a million people all over the world. If you want to take your Stoicism journey to the next level, I would love for you to subscribe. It's totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time. There's no spam. Just go to dailystoic.com/email. Love to see you there.