You Should Know This Before You Get Angry

"People will piss you off in this life. That’s a given. You’ll get cut off on the highway. You’ll be spoken to rudely. You’ll get blown off. Someone will drop the ball. Someone’s screaming baby will keep you up all night on a plane. But before you get upset, you should stop yourself. Because maybe there’s something you don’t quite know about the situation."Ryan gives an example of the wisdom behind this advice in today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***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 @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee 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.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good 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 at DailyStoic.com. You should know this before you get angry. People will piss you off in this life. That's a given. You'll get cut off on the highway. You'll be spoken to rudely. You'll get blown off. Someone will drop the ball. Someone screaming "baby" will keep you up all night. But before you get upset, you should stop yourself, because maybe there's something you don't quite know about that situation. Think of Brandon Matthews, who was about

• 0:51Ryan Holiday?

  to make contact on a putt that could have secured him a spot in the PGA Open, and then suddenly a spectator screamed. Matthews threw up his hands in disbelief. The interruption cost him the tournament. Well, it turns out that the middle-aged man who had yelled had Down Syndrome. In fact, he was such a fan of Matthews that he couldn't contain his excitement. "I was frustrated at first," Matthews said after, "because I didn't understand the full circumstances behind it. But once I did, it was a pretty easy situation for me to handle." He walked over to that fan and gave him his golf ball and a hug. "Until you know their reasons," Epictetus once said, "how do you know whether they have acted wrongly? That moron who cut you off on the highway, what if he's speeding to the hospital?

• 1:33Ryan Holiday?

  That crying baby could be sick, or have two parents who are just as exhausted as you. The person who spoke rudely to you might be dying. They might have a broken heart." The Stoics remind us to be empathetic. "Almost no one does wrong on purpose," Socrates said. "Maybe they don't know better. Maybe, as Marcus said, they don't know the difference between good and evil." Which is why we have to stop ourselves before we get angry. We have to think about their reasons, what's going on with them. It's okay that you might struggle to control your snap judgments and emotional responses. The word Epictetus used was Phantasia, which appears more than 200 times in his discourses. But what matters is what you do after that wears off, what we do next. That's what Brandon Matthews did.

• 2:16Ryan Holiday?

  He reined himself in, he got his mind around the situation, and then he went and did something touching and kind. And in that moment, he was as great an athlete as there ever was, pulling off of far more impressive feet than sinking that putt. Which is why the tournament officials of the Arnold Palmer Invitational offered Matthews a spot in the field, his first PGA Tour event. And it was well deserved. Strongly, I'm not saying you have an anger problem, but I think anger is a problem for all of us. That's why we put together our Taming Your Temper course. This is a number of the best insights from the Stoics on how to conquer your temper, how to get your anger under control, how to not be ruled by what the Stoics would call your passions.

• 3:00Ryan Holiday?

  Strongly suggest you check it out. It's something I work on. I've got a temper like anyone else. And in fact, I think most people have a temper, but it's greats who have managed to suppress that temper, managed to channel it, managed to not be ruled by it. So you can check out this course at dailystoic.com/temper.