When You Don’t Like What You See | Looking Out For Each Other

Marcus Aurelius, like all of us, would catch glimpses of himself in the mirror. As we talked about recently, Marcus would have checked himself in the mirror in the morning, he would have seen his reflection as he passed through a hallway, from one room to the next.--And in today's excerpt from The Daily Stoic, Ryan explains why its so beneficial to watch other people around us succeed, and why we should show our friends and loved ones affection while celebrating their advancements as if it were or own.✉️ 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. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from The Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

• 0:40Ryan Holiday?

  When you don't like what you see. Marcus Aurelius, like all of us, would catch glimpses of himself in the mirror. As we talked about recently, Marcus would have checked himself in the mirror in the morning. He would have seen his reflection as he passed through a hallway from one room to the next. Did he like what he saw? We can guess from meditations that the answer to this was not always yes. Marcus was not a perfect man. He had a temper. He had temptations. There must have been times when he would have related to that Bruce Springsteen verse. We can all relate to this, actually, because few of us are fully actualized. Few of us are totally on track. Few of us are living according to the philosophy that we purport to believe. Does that mean that we should feel like crap?

• 1:24Ryan Holiday?

  That we should curse the person looking back at us in the mirror? No, not at all. In fact, Marcus gives himself a reminder that we can all use. "Celebrate behaving like a human," he writes. "Pick yourself back up when you fail. Try to take that step forward and catch yourself before taking any more steps backwards." Be a good friend to yourself, as Seneca said, which means both encouragement and accountability. Keep going. Keep working. Make progress when and where you can.

• 1:58Ryan Holiday?

  Looking out for each other. This is the October 6th entry in the Daily Stoic. "It is in keeping with nature to show our friends affection and to celebrate their advancement as if it was our own. For if we don't do this, virtue, which is strengthened only by exercising our perceptions, will no longer endure in us." Seneca's Moral Letters, 109. "Watching other people succeed is one of the toughest things to do, especially when we are not doing well ourselves. In our hunter-gatherer minds, we suspect that life is a zero-sum game, that for someone to have more means that we might end up with less. But like all parts of philosophy, empathy and selflessness are a matter of practice.

• 2:42Ryan Holiday?

  As Seneca observed, it's possible to learn to rejoice in all their successes and be moved by their very failure. This is what a virtuous person does. They teach themselves to actively cheer for other people, even in cases where it might come, might have come at their own expense, to put aside jealousy and possessiveness. You can do that, too." I was actually just talking to someone I work with. We were talking about the sort of pettiness of writers' groups. And I said, "It's, they're all kind of frenemies, right? They see it as a zero-sum game." And I said, "There's a joke I heard about academia that the reason the knives are so sharp is because the pie is so small.

• 3:26Ryan Holiday?

  If you think of the pie as finite, if you think about life as zero-sum, it inherently makes everyone your enemy, right? It means you're having to get what's yours, which means you're having to get it from them or get it before them, as opposed to seeing it how it actually is, how the Stoics want us to see it, which is a collective, a whole, an infinite game." I've had to do work, especially as a competitive person, to understand that the success of another writer has nothing to do with me. It doesn't come at my expense. It helps me. More people reading is good, right? More people talking about Stoicism is good. I'm sure there are people that that see my the success of my books as being somehow

• 4:09Ryan Holiday?

  limiting to them, or unfair, or undeserved. Meanwhile, they're benefiting from the rising tide that's lifting all the boats, right? You got to think about how you look at it. You have to practice this. Robert Greene, in in in his book, The Laws of Human Nature, he talks about the difference between schadenfreude, like wishing bad things on other people, and mittenfreud, probably pronouncing these horribly wrong. This is also a day we broke out in The Daily Laws, which I was lucky enough to work on. If you haven't read, you should. We carried it in the Painted Porch. I think we even have some signed copies. Anyways, again, I don't that that there's another awesome daily laws, daily book out there.

• 4:53Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I remember Robert going, is that going to be a problem with your book? And I was like, no, this is amazing. More people reading something every day is good for the world and probably good for the category, too. Anyways, there's also a section of this in in The Daily Laws. But mittenfreud is the active wishing of success or goodwill towards people. I heard love once defined as as willing the good of the other, like wanting good for the other, wishing them happiness, wishing them success. As an author, wishing wishing you the biggest first week sales you could possibly have. I want that for you. It doesn't come at my expense. And even if it did, who am I to root against you? I'm going to do my best.

• 5:38Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to put out my best work. I'm going to go into this already, knowing that I'm playing with house money, that I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams and expectations, that I've written something I'm proud of, that I think deserves to be read, that I have faith in the long term will do what it needs to do. So there's there's no pettiness in me. There's no need for you to to do poorly. I just wish everyone success. Are there moments where I get caught with a pang of jealousy where I might say something that, you know, if I played it back to myself later, I'd be like, ew, that's not a good look? Of course, this is something you have to work on. It's like ego. In fact, it's rooted in ego. So it's something you have to constantly sweep away and push away.

• 6:21Ryan Holiday?

  But it gets you to a place where you are happier and you are better. It's not just by wishing other people good, you're making them happy. Theodore Roosevelt is right. Comparison is the thief of joy. Joseph Epstein is right when he said that of all the deadly sins, envy is the only one that's no fun. Living that way sucks. It punishes you most of all. Meanwhile, not being petty, not wanting to hold other people back, being happy, generally celebrating all the good things that are happening to other people and not seeing them as somehow bad for you. Well, this is a much happier and much more wonderful way to live. And I wish that for you. I wish that for you. But what I control is whether I try to live and act that way myself.

• 7:06Ryan Holiday?

  Speaking of which, Discipline is Destiny, The Power of Self-Control. If you haven't picked it up, you can pick it up at dailystoic.com/preorder. We're honoring the preorder bonuses, signed copies, et cetera. I hope you can check that out. Or you can pick it up anywhere books are sold, including there's an audiobook version, which I read. There's an ebook version, physical versions everywhere. Support your local bookstores. Come get it at the Painted Porch if you're in central Texas. But otherwise, thank you all, and I hope you enjoy the book. I'm really, really proud of it.