Don’t Make Assumptions

You don’t get a joke, so you say it’s not funny. You don’t like something, so you believe it sucks. You’re white, so you’ve always taken it for granted that the color ‘nude’ roughly matches your skin. You drive on the right side of the road, so it’s weird when you go somewhere and people drive on the left side. You love your job, so you have no patience for people complaining about theirs. You’ve been successful, so you can’t understand why other people struggle. We assume…and we make asses of ourselves. Our personal experiences make up a tiny percentage of the world, but a huge percentage of how we perceive the world.🎧 Check out Ryan's interview with Champion Distance Runner Lauren Fleshman.✉️ 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, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday 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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  Don't make assumptions. You don't get a joke, so you say it's not funny. You don't like something, so you believe it sucks. You're white, so you've always taken it for granted that the color nude roughly matches your skin. You drive on the right side of the road, so it's weird when you go someplace and people drive on the left side. You love your job, so you have no patience for people complaining about theirs. You've been successful, so you can't understand why other people struggle. We assume and we make asses of ourselves. Our personal experiences make up a tiny percentage of the world, but a huge percentage of how we perceive the world. We violate the rule that the great distance runner, Laura Fleishman, articulated on the Daily Stoic Podcast, which you should definitely listen to.

• 1:14Ryan Holiday?

  It was a great episode.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  You really only needed to have an experience like that probably once to have it shift into all these other places of your life, to bring that awareness everywhere. And so I find that really powerful. I wish we could mandate everyone have experiences like that. You're just so much less likely to assume that you're the default, and you just make space. You make space for there to be other ways of being.

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  Marcus Aurelius wrote that "everything turns on your assumptions about it. That's on you." He said, "You can pluck out that hasty judgment at will, and like steering a ship around the point, you will find calm seas, fair weather, and a safe port." He was saying that going through the world with hasty assumptions and prejudices is a fragile way of existing. It's also a selfish way of existing, too. A Stoic tries not to jump to hasty judgments. Instead, a Stoic is generous with assumptions, that something was an accident, that someone grew up differently than we did, that a joke must not be for us. A Stoic puts their impressions, their implicit judgments, their selfishness up to the test. They ask, "Is this true? Is this missing something? Is this just?"

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  A Stoic makes space for there to be other ways of being, even and especially the ways that we don't understand.