What’s It All For? It’s For This | Stoic Strategies To Control Your Temper

Life is difficult. People are obnoxious. Stuff is going to piss you off. But can you keep your cool anyway?🪙 Carry The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion as a reminder to pause. A pause creates space. A pause creates clarity. A pause can change everything. | Grab The Daily Stoic Pause & Reflect Medallion at dailystoic.com/pause📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ 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 Facebook 📢 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.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  What's it all for? It's for this. There was a reason we did that reading. There was a reason we did that journaling. There's a reason we look at those historical examples, listen to those stories of the greats and the not-so-greats. There was a reason we challenged ourselves against the cold, running up that mountain, lifting those weights, resisting those urges. We were training for this moment, this moment in time, but also this ordinary moment in our life. You know, the one where it feels like everything is falling apart and terrible, but also the one where the person next to us is being really, really annoying. We were training for this argument with our spouse or a friend. We were training for the way our boss was gonna screw us over. We were training for that email.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  We were training for being tired and burnt out. We were training so these things could happen and we could still keep our cool. Seneca relates the story of what Cato the Younger did when visiting the baths in Rome one day, was shoved and struck. Once the fight was broken up, he simply refused to accept an apology from the offender. "I don't even remember being hit," he said. There's the story of Marcus Aurelius betrayed by his most trusted general in a coup and not even being bothered by it. What did he do? He told his soldiers that this was an opportunity to teach the Roman people that there was a way even to deal with civil wars. That's what Stoicism is, right?

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  The ability to look at it all in the calm light of mild philosophy. The ability to not be rattled or driven into a rage, to not even remember being hit, to not be provoked into overreaction. Some people think that Stoicism is indifference or apathy, but it isn't. It's the ability to deal with emotionally charged situations and not let your emotions drive you into a fit or a frenzy, to help you not say or do things you might regret. Life is difficult. People are obnoxious. Stuff is gonna piss you off. But can you keep your cool anyway? Can you stay good when surrounded by bad? Kind when surrounded by cruelty?

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  Can you keep your eyes on the prize? Our job is not to lose our temper. Our job is to stay focused on solutions, keep doing what is right. I actually needed this advice myself. I was checking into a hotel late the other night with my kids. It'd been delayed. My kids have been disasters and our two adjoining rooms turned out not to be adjoining. And the clerk was rather rude about it. "I don't know who told you that we had adjoining rooms," he said. And I was like, "What do you mean, who told me? Every hotel in the world has adjoining rooms. What are you talking about?" And I got more upset than I wanted to, but I caught myself almost immediately thereafter. I apologized. I realized that he didn't design this hotel, right?

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  The idea is, can we pause and reflect? Can we catch ourselves before we do the thing that we're gonna regret, that we don't like, before we are that person that we don't want to be? And actually, I had it in my pocket. I remember grabbing it off my dresser as I left the house, knowing it was gonna be a long travel day. The Pause at Reflect a Coin, or the Pause and Reflect Coin that we've made over here at Daily Stoic, because it's a great reminder. "Delay is the best remedy," Seneca says. Count the letters of the alphabet. Really think about this. Get some perspective. Ask yourself who's to blame, what the stakes are, who you want to be. You touch it, it reminds you.

• 4:34Ryan Holiday?

  Count to three, count to 24, you count to 26.

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  Do your thing. It was made here in the US in one of the oldest custom mints still operating. Wendell's has been making challenge coins and medallions here in the US since the 1880s. Just a beautiful, physical reminder. And I'm glad I had it with me then. I think you'll be glad to have it with you wherever you are. And if you're working on your anger, your temper, as I constantly am, not that I have an anger problem, but anger causes problems for me. You might like our tame your temper course. You can get both the coin and the course together. 20 bucks off. I'll link to that in today's show notes. You don't have to turn this into something Marx really says it doesn't have to upset you. You've got to pause and reflect. It's a great little reminder.

• 5:24Ryan Holiday?

  DailyStoic.com/boys. I'll link to it in today's show notes. Check it out.

• 5:40Ryan Holiday?

  I once told my wife that she was frustrating me and she responded with probably the most frustrating thing you can imagine. She said, I can't make you frustrated. But to the Stoics, this is totally true because we're responsible for our own emotions. Epictetus says, if you find yourself offended, realize that you are complicit in taking offense. Things don't upset us. We choose to be upset about them. I know that's not easy to hear, especially in this political climate. How can we not be angry about things that are unjust, that are frustrating? Well, this is exactly where the Stoics step in. It's not that they didn't feel anger. It's that they understood that the reactions we take when we are angry are very rarely ever helpful.

• 6:23Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episodes. The best Stoic strategies for helping you tame your temper. You think you're the first person to live in political dysfunction? You think you're the first person to live in a time when it feels like the world is falling apart? You think you're the first person to live in a time when people are shitty to each other, when there's demagogues in power, when it feels like stuff is falling apart? No, you weren't. The ancient Stoics lived in the time of You know Socrates, he didn't live in the golden age of Athens. He lived in the time of thirty tyrants. He lived through a great power conflict. People have always lived in difficult times, but you know what they figured out? They figured out you gotta focus on what's in your control. You gotta figure out how to not let the assholes make you an asshole. You gotta do good where you can.

• 7:08Ryan Holiday?

  You gotta remind yourself what's important. You can't follow every news story. You can't be distracted by every outrage. You can't extrapolate everything into the end of the world. You have to ride it out. You have to focus. You have to stay good and stay decent. And then you gotta make a positive difference where you can. You can't give up hope. You have to stand strong. And you have to realize in times like these that there have always been times like these. And people got through it and you will get through it. And it may well be an opportunity for you to be great, to be heroic, to make a difference. That's what you focus on in dysfunctional, crazy, scary times.

• 7:50Ryan Holiday?

  There's a secret to not getting upset, to not getting angry, to not getting offended, to not being bothered, to focus. And it's simple. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor. He said, "You always have the power to have no opinion." He says, "Things are not asking to be judged by you." Don't turn this into something. The fewer opinions you have, the fewer judgments you make, the more you're able to just leave things as they are. The happier you will be, the more productive you will be, the more focused you will be. And the easier you will be to get along with. People tend to think stoicism is having no emotions.

• 8:30Ryan Holiday?

  But what I thought was so genius about Musashi, he's so transcended his emotions that he's able to use emotion effectively. And like I think about this, like when a basketball coach will get a technical on purpose. If you think it's about stripping emotion out of things, maybe that is part of it, but that's like beginner level. That's like, that's like basic. But the real thing is to be able to understand emotions, process them and then use them. Or at the very least, understand. Other people's emotions and be able to use those emotions to help them or you accomplish what is supposed to be accomplished.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, the the proper idea to me is sort of a lot of what I meditate about and is in Buddhism, where you don't try to repress your emotions because first of all, you can't. We are emotional animals. And if ever you have tried to repress your emotions, particularly in a state of meditation, you see you have zero control over them. You know, it's the way we're wired. So the proper idea stance is I'm not going to repress emotions, but I'm going to understand them. I'm going to see them as they occur with a degree of distance. I'm going to see that I'm angry in this moment. I'm going to almost like have a, I like to imagine it as if I'm like six inches away from myself. I don't know why that metaphor come up.

• 9:47Ryan Holiday?

  Only six inches? That doesn't seem that far.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's out this side. It's like here. However, that's like a more like a foot, I guess. And I'm looking at what I'm thinking or feeling from that distance, almost from the outside. And I'm still feeling it, but I'm seeing it as if it's from, as if I'm another person. And that's a strange concept.

• 10:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  But you can observe your own emotions while you're feeling them. And then you, they don't have power over you. Then you can say, okay, I'm angry. Why am I angry? So number one, I recognize the emotion. Number two, why am I angry? Is it stemmed from something weeks ago, months ago or earlier today? And then what do I do with my anger? Sometimes you want to use your anger. You want to channel your anger. So when you're in sports, if you don't have that kind of drive and that anger, when you're in a bet, you know, when you're down by 12 points.

• 10:36Ryan Holiday?

  It's like an extra gear.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:37Ryan Holiday?

  You can pull.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a little bit of anger and even, I don't know, hatred or something. You just despise the enemy. You're going to crush them. You use that emotion. But as Phil Jackson said, if that emotion controls you throughout 48 minutes of a game, you're useless. You drain yourself. You can't control it.

• 10:54Ryan Holiday?

  You also make mistakes.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Make mistakes. So you need to be focused, but you also need to be able to use those emotions.

• 11:01Ryan Holiday?

  When we lose our temper inevitably, who does it seem to be with? It's, it's not the stranger. It's not the asshole who's a bad driver. It's not the colleague at work. It's our family. It's the people close to us. We'll stomach some pretty rude behavior from people we don't know. But, but God forbid your son leaves his shoes where you told him not to put them. You'll be patient with your assistant when you have to repeat yourself. But if your spouse says what? God help them. Seems like a paradox, but really it's it's the problem of proximity. Precisely because the people are closest to us, we have more encounters, more interactions with them. The people who are bad are far away from us, but the people who are close to us, they they live with us.

• 11:43Ryan Holiday?

  Let's not be angry at good people, Seneca reminds us. It's strange, like the people who are mostly good, who love us, who put up with us are the ones who get our frustration. And it shouldn't be that way. You have to remind yourself that yelling, getting upset, it it doesn't make you feel better. And it certainly doesn't make your relationships better. Remind yourself how small your kids are. Remind yourself what your spouse has to put up with. The fact that we can get mad at someone, the fact that they'll put up with it, the fact that in some cases they don't have a choice. That's not an excuse. We should try not to get upset with anyone, the Stoics would say. But if we're gonna get mad, let's make sure the object of our frustration is a target of offense, not opportunity.

• 12:24Ryan Holiday?

  People suck. They just do. Even if you just say only a tiny percentage of people suck. There's a lot of people, which means there's a lot of shitty people out there. And in fact, Marcus really opens meditations with a reminder of the kinds of people we're gonna meet in life. Says, in the course of a day, you're gonna meet people who are jealous and dishonest and stupid and annoying and frustrated. You're gonna meet all these kinds of people in the course of a day, in the course of a life. So what do the Stoics teach us? They teach us that first and foremost, we should not be surprised by this. When we're surprised by it, then we're disappointed, then we resent it. If we understand that it's a part of life, then we'll be able to deal with it. But then second, the Stoics have their most important teaching. They tell us that these people are an opportunity. They're an opportunity for us to practice all sorts of good qualities, all sorts of good virtues.

• 13:09Ryan Holiday?

  People are a chance for us to practice patience and toughness and empathy and forgiveness and understanding. They're a chance for us to grow and change and learn and be what we're only capable of being when we are being challenged, when we are dealing with difficult people. So yeah, people do suck. Life is filled with annoying people, but these people, they give us an opportunity. That's what the obstacle is, the way means. That's who Marcus really is talking about in that famous. This passage where he says the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. He's talking about those people, the people you wish were otherwise the people not looking forward to meeting. They are a chance for you to grow and change and be made better. They are a chance for you to practice the virtues that you are meant to practice.

• 13:54Ryan Holiday?

  A person can change, but people, people don't change. You can change, but the world, the world abideth forever. It is undefeated. It is exactly the same as it ever was and ever will be. This is what we see in Mark's realist's meditations. His complaints about humanity are the exact same complaints we have today. People complain, people are dishonest, people are jealous, people are lazy, people are loud. People are people. We've been waiting on the world to change for a very long time and it doesn't. This is why Mark's really reminds himself, don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. That's not where you live. That's not how things work.

• 14:36Ryan Holiday?

  This isn't about being cynical, but in deciding not to be naive, we are setting ourselves up actually to be less cynical. The problem is our expectation. The problem is our false hopes. The problem is our delusions. And when they get shattered, then we get bitter and resentful. This isn't to say that you shouldn't try. This isn't to say that we can't make a difference. This isn't to say that we ourselves can't be a bright light amidst the darkness. No, that's actually the whole point. The world is going to stay the same, but we can change, we can improve. And still wisdom has to remind us that for the most part, this impact is going to be infinitesimal. Most of all, we can't take this personally. Most of all, we shouldn't set ourselves up for disappointment or disillusionment. Don't stay up waiting for the world to change.

• 15:21Ryan Holiday?

  It's not going to. If you want to see change, you have to be changed.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And I love the quote by Seneca. We are bad men living amongst bad men and only one thing will calm us. And that is we must go easy on each other.

• 15:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  To me, that's the great calming quote because I think if I was to diagnose one of society's biggest problems right now, it's anger. There's a huge increase in reporting of domestic violence in Australia. I'm sure those statistics are. Across the board, road rage has gone up. Also, every shop you go into, little signs saying, "Don't abuse the staffs." It's insane. We have an anger problem. Stoicism is so explicit in how you handle anger and how you stop yourself from becoming reactive. If there's one thing I want the world to take from Stoicism at the moment, it's just dealing with anger.

• 16:07Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't matter how tough the situation is. It doesn't matter how worked up you are. It doesn't matter how stressed you are. Try taking a walk. There's a Latin expression, "Solvitur ambulando." Basically, it means it is solved by walking. Get moving, get outside, get active, go for a walk. Let the mind wander as you wander about, right? The idea is it is solved by walking. They didn't have to make that comment. They didn't have to be a jerk. They didn't have to point that out. They could have done nothing, but they didn't. And so now we have a choice. How are we going to respond? We don't control other people. That's the idea in Stoicism, but we control how we respond. Epictetus said that when you find yourself offended, when you get upset, realize that you are complicit in taking the offense.

• 16:51Ryan Holiday?

  Marx really said, "Remember, you don't have to turn this into something." Life is hard, people aren't perfect. They don't understand how things are going to be felt or perceived by other people. They're going to keep doing this for as long as they exist. But we have to decide, are we going to go around being offended all the time? Being hurt all the time? Feeling slighted all the time? Getting worked up all the time? We have control over that. And we can decide not to waste our time getting offended, getting upset. We can focus on what we control, which is who we are in response to the things people do and say to us.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  You need to begin every day by telling yourself, you're going to meet the person that's going to piss you off, frustrate you. I understood then that anger comes in many different flavors. And there's the anger that was demonstrated to me by my dad, which was yelling. And that's how you asserted power was by whoever was loud is one. Or throwing things, or there's a physical demonstration of anger. Or there's the very passive, what I did, which was I grew up and I was this gangly, awkward teenager. I was never going to win a fistfight, but I will eviscerate you with my words. Cut you down. So there's the verbal anger. There's frustration where I've seen it in my son, where if I get frustrated, I see, I see myself in him. I see this mirror of myself. He goes, oh, come on. I'm like, you got that from me 100%.

• 18:10Ryan Holiday?

  It's like a Christmas story. Where'd you learn to curse like that?

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I couldn't tell him it was from them. Fudge, but only I didn't say fudge, I said the real thing.

• 18:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  I realize I'm like, oh, this is how I'm now imparting them unto him. And there's some things where you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

• 18:25Ryan Holiday?

  At the root of so many mistakes, the downfall of so many powerful people is what? It's anger. You never are glad you lost your temper. And in fact, you almost always regret it. One of the early Stoics advised the emperor, he said, whenever you feel yourself getting angry Caesar, don't do or say anything until you've repeated all the letters of the alphabet. Meaning, take a pause, take a minute, don't rush into it, don't react emotionally. Calm down. Your temper will not solve this problem. It almost certainly will make it worse. If you want to get pissed off less, if you want to be frustrated less, if you want to be disappointed less, if you want to have your feelings hurt less, you have to understand a very basic piece of advice from the ancient Stoics. And it comes to us from Epictetus.

• 19:11Ryan Holiday?

  He says, it's not things that upset us, it's our opinion about things. The remark is the remark and then we decide that it's rude. We have the expectation that it should go a certain way. And then we decide it's a bad thing that it went that way. We tell ourselves that we're ruined, that our reputation has been harmed, that we've been screwed over, that this is really bad. The event is, and then we have an opinion about it. Shakespeare said the same thing. He said, nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. This is the most basic bit of ancient philosophy. The thing is objective, our opinion about it is not. We decide what it means. We tell ourselves a story about it,

• 19:52Ryan Holiday?

  which means we can tell ourselves a good story about it, which means we can tell ourselves no story about it. That's our power. If you want to be upset less, if you want to have your feelings hurt less, just remember this advice from Epictetus. It's not the thing that upsets us, it's our opinion about that thing. Getting angry, whenever you find yourself getting really worried, getting jealous, when you are hoping things go a really specific way. This is evidence Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher, says that you're probably focused on something outside of your control. You are looking outside yourself. When you're focused on what's up to you, you're not thinking about how things are gonna go, you're not thinking about other people, you're not worried, you're not praying, you're not pining, you're just focused on what you have to do.

• 20:37Ryan Holiday?

  You are preoccupied with the parts of it that are up to you, which is how it should be.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  So I think the main thing that I take from Stoicism is that rather than lecturing our kids, we should try and be role models to them. So if I want my little girl to be better at managing her temper, I should show her that I can do, I should go there first. And actually, I learned something from psychological research that helps me in that regard, because kids can't read our minds, so it's a good idea to use something that psychologists call the talk aloud technique, where I would kind of say, "Man, I'm getting really annoyed about this thing, I don't know what to do about it. I guess I need to take a deep breath and just think it through and look at it from another perspective." So by talking aloud about how I'm coping with a problem like anger or anxiety and overcoming it, that allows me to role model some Stoic attitudes and skills to my kids.

• 21:27Ryan Holiday?

  The first thing you have to do is just not make stuff worse. As Marcus Aurelius says, "How much more harmful are the consequences of anger and grief than the circumstances that arouse them in us?" That was today's entry in The Daily Stoic. Marcus Aurelius would have agreed with the first rule of holes, which is that when you're in one, stop digging. Just don't make it worse. So often, our overreactions, our emotional reactions, the way we take things personally, the way we despair, it takes a hard problem and it makes them worse. So today, what I want you to do is just focus on not adding to your troubles. As Seneca says, "I choose not to be a hindrance to myself. I choose not to complain about what's happened.

• 22:10Ryan Holiday?

  I'm gonna focus on what I can do with what happened." So the idea for the Stoics is, we don't make our problems worse. We focus on what we control, how we can make them better, and we just get to work. Getting upset, it can feel cathartic, feel like you're accomplishing something. But in fact, it's not just ineffectual, it's totally illogical and insane. In his famous essay on anger, Seneca likens getting angry at someone or something to returning a bite to a dog or a kick to a mule. I think about that when I get angry at the TV remote, it's not working. And I slam it and I go, I just punished an inanimate object. What the hell am I doing?

• 22:53Ryan Holiday?

  This is actually the exact sort of epiphany that Seneca wants us to have. He says that we should look at ourselves in the mirror when we're angry and see how ugly and insane and deranged getting upset is. Actually, I carry in my pocket this coin we make for Daily Stoic, and it has a mirror on the front for this very reason. And it's to remind myself, as Seneca's advice went, that you should look at yourself in the mirror and see what an ugly, overwhelming, distortive emotion it is. It turns you into someone and something that you almost certainly would not want to be. Anyways, if you could use some help with your anger problem, or the problems that anger

• 23:35Ryan Holiday?

  causes you, head over to dailystoic.com/angercoin. You can grab one of these. We also have a really great course, the Tame Your Temper course, that I think pairs well with this. I know this has helped me in my life, and if you want 20% off your version of this coin, you can just use code ANGER20 in the checkout. And I think you'll like this thing. There's a real simple way to know whether you're making any progress in life, whether this philosophy stuff is making a difference. What the Stoic said was, how often are you getting in arguments? A beautiful person, a good person, Epictetus says, he doesn't fight with anyone. He said, they know what's their affair and what isn't. And he says, when you know what's your business and what's not, where is the room for fighting?

• 24:19Ryan Holiday?

  If Stoicism isn't freeing you from online outrage, from petty arguments, from being short with Your spouse from being a little less contentious with your kids. What is it doing? And I'm not saying that agreeableness is the goal of life. I'm just saying it is a sign of wisdom. I I'm just saying that acceptance and tolerance and generally being at an even keel is a sign of wisdom. You gotta be able to mind your own business. You gotta be able to focus on what actually matters. You gotta be able to be kind, to be patient, to be restrained, to keep an open mind. These are the byproducts of stoicism, of philosophical virtue.

• 25:03Ryan Holiday?

  And they're a sign that you are making progress in life. At the root of all of my problems, when I look back at my life, anxiety, worry, anger, fear. At the root of all of it was strong emotions that didn't end up making the situation any better. All the things I've been angry about, all the things I've been anxious about, all the things I've been worked up about. Did it make one fucking shred of difference? No, it didn't. Marx really says in Meditations, the causes of our emotions are often worse than the thing we're worried or emoting about. That anger makes stuff worse, anxiety makes stuff worse. When I look back at my life, I see how these strong overwhelming passions, as the Stoics call them, the things that get us worked up. They weren't helping me.

• 25:47Ryan Holiday?

  They weren't even avoiding the things that I wanted to avoid or bringing me the things I wanted them to bring. No, they were just causing me needless distress, needless worry. They were taking me out of the moment and preventing me from from having peace, from having any stillness and from being who I wanted to be. The people you don't like, the people who believe things you don't like, the people that believe things that upset you. You have to remember that they're not wrong on purpose. In Meditations, Marx really quotes Plato. Plato said, against their will, their souls are cut off from truth. It might not feel that way. It might feel like they are willfully wrong, but almost certainly they are not. Think about the dumb things that you have believed in the past. Think about the times when you were wrong. Did you think you were wrong at the time? No, you thought you were right. Marx really quotes Plato.

• 26:31Ryan Holiday?

  He says, against their will, they are cut off from truth, they're cut off from justice. He said, they're cut off from the right path. His famous passage where he laments how obnoxious and annoying people are. He says, "Why are they like this?" He says, "'Cause they don't know the difference between doing things the right way and the wrong way." And he says, "When you remember this, it makes you more patient with other people." That was what Stoicism was designed to help him do. You can't change other people. You can't make them not wrong. You can't make them not annoying. But you can work to be more patient and understanding and empathetic to those people.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  How do you deal with anger?

• 27:04Ryan Holiday?

  Seneca has a beautiful essay called "On Anger," and he's talking to his brother, but he's really talking to Nero, and I think he's really talking to himself. Marcus Rilis clearly has an anger problem, or he wouldn't talk about it so much in Meditations, a book meant only for his private use. So I don't think there's some part of the study of Stoicism that allows you to be anger-free, but hopefully we can get to a point where we do think less things out of anger. So when you feel yourself getting upset, when you feel yourself being frustrated, when you have an emotional reaction, that you stop before you hit "send" on the email or before you throw the punch, whatever it is that you're about to do. So I think about it as making a distinction between having the emotion, feeling the emotion,

• 27:47Ryan Holiday?

  which is natural, which is probably unavoidable, and taking action on the emotion, which maybe you have a split second to prevent. It might not seem like much, but it may well be the hardest thing to do in the world. In a time of dysfunction, in a time of conflict and division amidst chaos and disinformation and misinformation, when cruelty and meanness are widely accepted, when the system is falling apart and it looks like the center may not hold, your main job, the most important thing you can do is don't become a lunatic, right? Don't let it infect you. Don't let crazy people make you crazy. Don't let assholes turn you into an asshole. Think of the Rome that Marcus Rilis lived in. Think of Seneca under Nero.

• 28:30Ryan Holiday?

  These would have been crazy times. These were dark times. Chrysippus, one of the early Stoics, said, "Look, if I wanted to be part of the mob, I never would have studied philosophy. I never would have become a philosopher." The point is, you have to stand apart. You have to not get sucked in. You can't let it break you. You can't let it make you despair. You can't let it make you crazy. You can't let it make you abandon your principles. You don't control what's going on out there, but you control who you are in here. You control who you are in this world. And the idea is to not let it affect you, to not let it make you crazy, to not let it make you worse. And that's the first step to making it better.

• 29:07Speaker 05

  Hi, Ryan.

• 29:08Ryan Holiday?

  Hi.

• 29:08Speaker 05

  I want to say that your book, "Obscures the Way," helped me finish my master's thesis.

• 29:14Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 29:16Speaker 05

  Thank you for that. I want to ask you about when you know something or someone is annoying you or whatever, but you can't accept that they don't maybe agree with you, how to have peace with that and not let it take your own peace away.

• 29:33Ryan Holiday?

  One of my favorite quotes from the Stoics, it's in Meditations. Marx realist says, "Remember, you always have the power to have no opinion." He says, "Things are not asking to be judged by you." Now imagine this is being said by a person whose opinion was literally law. He had the life and death power over people. And here he is reminding himself to live and let live, that he doesn't have to let things bother him. He doesn't have to try to change everything. He can just let some things be. Now, this sounds like not much of a power. You always have the power to have no opinion. But how many people do we know that have no such power? I mentioned Elon Musk earlier. Elon Musk is an incredibly powerful, incredibly wealthy person. But has he ever had an opinion he was able to keep to himself? Not that I know of. It's a hard thing to do, to just shut up.

• 30:18Ryan Holiday?

  You know, to just focus on your stuff. That's what I try to do in my life as best as I can. Something I'm going through with my kids. I'll be like, "Oh, wait. I don't need to have an opinion on whether this show is good or not. You like it." I like that expression, "You don't have to yuck someone else's yum." Like, you like it, so it's good to you. It's not something I need to convince you of otherwise. And so, having fewer opinions is something I'm trying to practice and will be forced to practice over the next few years, I suspect. Your anger is impotent. Marx realist in Meditations, he quotes a line from a lost play by the playwright Euripides. And the line says, "And why should you feel anger at the world as if the world would notice?" Nobody cares. It doesn't matter.

• 31:03Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't mean anything. Your anger, your resentment, your grievance, you are shouting into an enormous void. You are yelling at an inanimate object. You are mad at forces that are so enormous, that are utterly amoral, completely indifferent to you and your existence. So you might as well let it go.

• 31:25Ryan Holiday?

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