You’ll Be Called Worse…By Better

Marcus Aurelius was the public face of an empire. Seneca published plays and books. Cato and Cicero ran for office. Epictetus was a slave to a powerful Roman, at his whim and his mercy. In other words, they knew what it was like to be criticized.🎙️ 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 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.

• 0:05Ryan 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.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  You'll be called worse by better. Marcus Aurelius was the public face of an empire. Seneca published books and plays. Cato and Cicero ran for office. Epictetus was a slave to a powerful Roman at his whim and mercy. In other words, they knew what it was like to be criticized. They knew what it was like to be received warmly by the audience, and not so warmly. They were subject to withering abuse, talked about as if they were not standing right there, or as if they didn't have normal, human feelings. But of course, they did. But what Stoicism was there to do was to help them endure

• 1:36Ryan Holiday?

  the pains and blows of feedback and critique and attack. "If only they really knew me," Epictetus once joked, "they'd say even worse things." This was his way of making light of the cruel things that he would have often heard by his abusive owner. "We care about ourselves more than other people," Marcus Aurelius writes with bafflement in Meditations, "but care about other people's opinions more than our own." In another passage, he reminds himself to consider the character and the habits of the person attacking him, thinking about what they were doing in private just a few minutes ago. These public-facing stoics would have loved the response of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre

• 2:21Ryan Holiday?

  Trudeau when he was told that Richard Nixon had called him an asshole. "I have been called worse things by better people," he would later write. "Being criticized is part of the job. So is being misunderstood. Being abused isn't fair, but no one gets out of life without experiencing their share of it. We have to be ready for it, and ready to put it in its proper context. We have to be ready to shrug it off and count ourselves as lucky that it wasn't worse, because it always can be."