What You Need To Know About Most People | Sweat the Small Stuff

“It’s true. As Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, today you will meet jealous people. Selfish people. Mean people. Shameless people. Even stupid people.”Ryan discusses how we should view the vast majority of people, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast. Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50.***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/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic See 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 another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

• 0:43Ryan Holiday?

  What you need to know about most people. It's true, as Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, "Today you will meet jealous people, selfish people, mean people, shameless people, even stupid people." It can be easy to get the wrong idea, though, especially when you're taking guidance from Marcus's writings. Because yes, such people do exist and have always existed. And yes, if you ever find yourself in an exalted position like Marcus, there will be a disproportionate number of those people around you on a regular basis. But it's important to remember that in the normal world, in our world, most people are not those people. As the wonderful children's book Most People reminds us,

• 1:26Ryan Holiday?

  "Most people love to laugh and smile. Most people love to see other people laugh and smile, too. Most people are good people." In one of Marcus's most famous passages, he indirectly confirms this is true. After bumping into a particularly frustrating person, he asks himself, "Is a world without frustrating people possible?" "No," he realizes. So, "Understand," he says, "that this is just one of the allotted number, and let that give you some solace." But this is the trick, right? It only provides you solace if you understand that such people are in the minority, that most people are like you, or at a minimum, most people are at least trying to be like you.

• 2:11Ryan Holiday?

  And that's one of the best lines in Most People as well. It says, "A person who is frowning and mad, or sad, or mean is like a sour grape in a bunch of sweet grapes. That person would almost always rather be happy, smiling, and laughing." You need to remember that.

• 2:31Ryan Holiday?

  Sweat the small stuff. This is from today's entry in the Daily Stoic. 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living. You can get an ebook, audiobook read by me. We even have a leather bound edition in the Daily Stoic store. Today's quote comes to us from Zeno. Actually, we don't get this directly from Zeno, but it's passed along to us by Diogenes Laertes. He says, "Well-being is realized by small steps, but it is truly no small thing." The famous biographer Diogenes Laertes attributes this quote to Zeno, but admits that it might also have been said by Socrates, meaning that it might be a quote of a quote of a quote. But does it really matter?

• 3:16Ryan Holiday?

  Truth is truth. In this case, the truth is one we all know well, that little things add up. Someone is a good person, not because they say they are, but because they take good actions. One does not magically get one's act together. It is a matter of many individual choices. It's a matter of getting up at the right time, making your bed, resisting shortcuts, investing in yourself, doing your work. And make no mistake, while the individual action is small, its cumulative impact is not. Think about all the small choices that will roll themselves out in front of you today. Do you know which are the right way and which are the easy way?

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Choose the right way and watch as these little things add up towards transformation. I did a piece about this not long ago, and it's sort of the basis of the habit challenge that we do for Daily Stoic as well. But George Washington's favorite saying was, "Many mickles make a muckle." The idea that things add up, that things are cumulative. Marcus Aurelius says that we assemble our life action by action. And he says, "The benefit of doing it this way is that when you shrink it down to these individual actions, it's very unlikely that someone will get in your way." Right? When Nick Saban talks about the process, he's saying like, "Look, if your goal is to win a national championship, and that's all you're focused on, there's so..."

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  So many things that can go wrong between you and that goal that determine whether you have the success or failure you want and make it, it's so all or nothing, I guess, right? But if you focus instead on like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kill it at practice today. I am going to throw the hell out of this ball. I am really going to listen to my coach, to this podcast episode right now. I'm gonna do this thing in front of me, however small it is, I'm gonna do it extraordinarily well. That's, that really can't be interfered with and that cumulative impact has the big difference, right? Something can get in the way of you striking it rich in some, you know, scheme or genius

• 5:23Ryan Holiday?

  play or breakthrough invention or, you know, whatever you think is gonna make your fortune. But very little can get in the way of you methodically, consistently saving and investing, you know, in, with a long-term target in mind, right? And that compounding effect is what the Stoics are talking about. I think the other thing that's important to note here, I've always said that I think epiphanies are overrated, if they exist at all, right? This idea of like this big breakthrough moment, the Zen Buddhist talk of satori, the idea of like the moment that enlightenment appears, I don't think that that's it.

• 6:04Ryan Holiday?

  And I think what Zeno is saying is you don't just get there on this singular breakthrough, you get to that, that, that real well-being, that, that smooth flow of life that the Stoics are talking about, you get to enlightenment slowly and surely in these small steps. And, and although each individual's action is small, the actual place you arrive, the enlightenment that you get to, that's the big thing. Most of the, the big conclusions or big principles or big ideas that I now base my life around didn't strike me like lightning. It was a slow unveiling, a slow reveal. That's how I got there. And I think that's how you'll get there too today. So focus on the little things you can do right.

• 6:48Ryan Holiday?

  Focus on habits, focus on accumulating, focus on systems, focus on breakthroughs, and I think you'll get where you want to go.