Transcend Your First Impression

It’s perfectly reasonable to tremble in the face of danger, Donald Robertson writes in his wonderful book, How To Think Like a Roman Emperor, and it was likely that Cato and Marcus Aurelius were scared on the eve of battle or before an important speech. But we don’t hold that against them, because what mattered is what they did next.🎓 Sign up for the Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge to create better habits in 2023: https://dailystoic.com/challenge✉️ 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, including the new premium leatherbound edition of Meditations (Gregory Hays translation).📱 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.

• 0:27Ryan Holiday?

  The Stoics believed that stressful and dangerous situations unfold like this. Something happens. We wake up to reports that the stock market is taking a dive. We get screamed at by our boss. The doctor raises an eyebrow and recommends we go in for further testing. And this, of course, provokes a reaction. Not a good one, a scared one, or an angry one, something emotional. Or we go the opposite way, and we just shut down, paralyzed by events. The Stoics called these involuntary and immediate impressions that we form in response to bad news or stress, phantasia. Contrary to what you might think, the Stoics were quite sympathetic to these reactions. They understood them as natural and largely out of our control.

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  You throw something surprising at someone, they're going to be surprised. That's how it works. That's why it's called surprise. Stoicism is not a philosophy meant to show you how to stop that. Instead, what Stoicism is about is what to do next, what to do after the involuntary impression that has been given its moment. As Donald Robertson writes in his wonderful book, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor, the Stoic tells himself that although the situation may appear frightening, the truly important thing in life is how he chooses to respond. "It's perfectly reasonable to tremble in the face of danger," he says.

• 1:55Ryan Holiday?

  "And it was likely that Cato and Marcus Aurelius were scared on the eve of battle or before an important speech. But we don't hold that against them because what mattered is what they did next. They led the charge. They gave the speech. They did the right thing anyway. They transcended those first impressions. They transcended those emotions. And so must you.

• 2:25Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized, you can get them sent to a friend. The Obstacle is the Way, He Goes the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, the leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com.