Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Here’s to the Renegades | Stop Caring What People Think About this episode Ryan talks about why the Stoics do what is right above all else, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day. The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge is a 9-week course that was built to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. It is now a recorded course, which means all participants will join the course and move through it at their own pace. Sign up at https://dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that provides free research and support to help people have a positive impact with their career. To get started planning a career that works on one of the world’s most pressing problems, sign up now at 80000hours.org/stoic. Sunday can help you grow a beautiful lawn without the guesswork OR nasty chemicals. Full-season plans start at just $129, and you can get 20% off at checkout when you visit GETSUNDAY. COM/STOIC. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow 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.
Transcript 0:06 Speaker 00 Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful co-author and collaborator, Stephen Hanselman. And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the Stoics, from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, then some analysis from me. And then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.
0:44 Speaker 00 All the Stoics were active in life, trying to make a difference, trying to have a positive impact on the world. They were suspicious of the pen and ink philosophers, of people who just wrote about stuff who didn't do it. But we've talked before about how you're only on this planet for like 4,000 weeks. Let's say you work for 40 years of that time. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 40 years. That's 80,000 hours. Your career is roughly 80,000 hours. It's a lot of time, but it's also not a lot of time. You really can't afford to waste it. But if you dedicate yourself and end that time productively and effectively, you can have a huge positive impact on the world. You can serve the common good, as the Stoics talk about.
1:26 Speaker 00 Well, 80,000 hours is a nonprofit that provides free research and support to help people do just that, to have a positive impact with their career. You can join their newsletter. They'll send you a free in-depth guide that takes you through all the steps, all the way to a concrete career plan. They host an awesome job board with nearly 1,000 open, high-impact career opportunities, and they offer free one-on-one advice to help you switch paths. There's also a great 80,000 Hours podcast, which hosts super in-depth conversations with experts about how to best tackle pressing global problems. You can join the newsletter right now. Get a free copy of their in-depth career guide, sent right to your inbox. Just sign up at 80000hours.org/stoic. That's 80, the number 80,000.
2:10 Speaker 00 Spelled out hours.org/stoic, 80000hours.org/stoic. And just to be clear, they're a nonprofit and everything they provide is free always. They're fully philanthropically funded. Their only goal is to help you have more impact in your career with those 80,000 hours that you have on this planet. To get started planning a career that works, sign up at 80000hours.org/stoic.
2:40 Speaker 00 Here's to the renegades. There is a group of students at Brown University who want to remove a 100-year-old statue of Marcus Aurelius because Marcus and Rome were colonizers. And there is an easy critique of the Stoics, that they were a bunch of old white guys and that Stoicism was a philosophy of the status quo, of accepting the way things are or were. But this, of course, would have been news to the actual Stoics in the ancient world, and not just because they were born in Turkey and Iraq and Syria and Libya, Egypt, but because for roughly four centuries in ancient Greece and Rome, the Stoics were renegades of their time and age.
3:23 Speaker 00 They fought against tyranny, that's Thrasia. They marched to the beat of their own drum, challenging conventions and expectations of elite society, that would be Cato. They challenged gender roles, bringing women into philosophy, this would be Musonius. And they spoke out about corruption and unfairness, that would have been Antipater. They were a constant thorn in the side of the powers that be, of the status quo, coming to be known for a generation in the first century as "the Stoic Opposition," a title that earned many Stoics exile and torture, even death. And when it came to Rome, the conservative leadership found Stoicism so transgressive that they tried to ban it. The point is that the Stoics were and remain renegades.
4:05 Speaker 00 They question, they fight, they refuse to compromise, they demand only what is right. They insist on virtue even if the world around them is falling to pieces. They don't always succeed, but, and they aren't always appreciated for this, but they do it anyway. They do it because it's what the philosophy demands. It's what leadership and privilege demand. The Stoics stepped up and showed that philosophy wasn't something they just talked about, but something they did. And they did it in the face of convention, of the status quo, and of the old, rich, white guys in power. And of course, you can read about the Lives of the Stoics that I was talking about, and Lives of the Stoics. But I think a better way to understand Stoicism and leadership and creating change would be this leadership course that we built.
4:48 Speaker 00 It's a nine-week course called The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom for the Modern Leader. And it's designed to mirror the kind of education that produced the historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. And the Leadership Challenge, it's a masterclass with the cadence and rigor of a boot camp. It's 63 emails, over 30,000 words of content, 12 hours of Q and As and deep dives with me and some of today's greatest leaders. And you can head over to dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge to learn more about this leadership masterclass. The world could use more great leaders, and we hope you'll become one of them. You can also sign up for Daily Stoic Life to get this course and all our other Stoic challenges and courses for free. That's at dailystoiclife.com.
5:33 Speaker 00 But I do hope you check out the Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge. We've previewed some of the leadership deep dives here on the podcast over the years. But you can sign up at dailystoic.com/leadershipchallenge, and I hope you do.
5:49 Speaker 00 Stop caring what people think.
5:53 Speaker 00 And I'm reading to you today from The Daily Stoic, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living by yours truly, my co-author and translator, Stephen Hanselman. You can get signed copies, by the way, in the Daily Stoic store. Over a million copies of The Daily Stoic in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. Spend more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks, on the bestsellers. It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoic.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. And the quote today is from Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12:14. "I'm constantly amazed by how easily we love ourselves above all others, yet we put
6:35 Speaker 00 more stock in the opinions of others than in our own estimation of self. How much credence we give to the opinions of our peers and how little to our very own." Then the meditation says, how quickly we disregard our own feelings about something and adopt someone else's. We think a shirt looks good at the store, but view it with shame and scorn if our spouse or coworker makes an offhanded remark. We can be immensely happy with our own lives until we find out that someone we don't like has even more. Or worse or more precariously, we can feel good about our accomplishments or talents until some third party validates them. Like most Stoic exercises, this one attempts to
7:17 Speaker 00 teach us that although we control our own opinions, we don't control what other people think about us, about ourselves, least of all. And for this reason, putting ourselves at the mercy of these opinions and trying to gain the approval of others are a dangerous endeavor. Don't spend too much time thinking about what other people think. Think about what you think. Think instead about the results, about the impact, and about whether it is the right thing to do. I think about Cato when I think about this idea. So Cato famously is very wealthy, but he lives quite frugally. He doesn't wear a hat when he walks outside in Rome. He doesn't wear a fancy toga. He's often barefoot. These are things that people would have thought
8:01 Speaker 00 to be low class or out of style. So Cato sort of marches to the beat of his own drummer. And I think those things he was pursuing were good unto themselves, but what I think he was really doing is practicing not caring what other people thought about him, not caring about his reputation. And so famously, when public opinion changes in Rome, Caesar appeals to the masses, Rome is going in a dangerous direction. Cato doesn't go with the tide. He stands for what's right. He stands for what he believes. He doesn't care that he's often the odd man out. People are questioning him, that people are judging him. He's practiced for this very moment.
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10:32 Speaker 00 And I don't think it's just big stuff like this. I mean, it's about cultivating that sense of what you need to do, what you think about, what's right for your family, what's right for yourself. And then being okay being judged or looked at, askance or whatever. I mean, being a parent has been very good for me in this, right? Like, you know, maybe you're, you don't like to hurt other people's feelings. You don't like to say no. You don't want people to know how you think about things. But with a kid, you're like, oh no, this isn't about me. If I say yes, yes, yes to all this stuff I don't want to do, that comes out of the time that I spend with my family. Or if you are really conscious about what other people think about you, if they think you look silly or stupid.
11:16 Speaker 00 Think about the laughs that deprives you of with your kids. Think about the memories that this deprives you of with your kids. Think about how buttoned up and restrained this makes you. I'm thinking about this actually right now. Like, so I'm, I'm about to fly. I've got to go do a talk, then I'm back, and then to talk, and then back for a day and a half, then to talk. It's a, it's a lot of travel. It's lucrative. And then, you know, we live in a world where they, they just lifted the mask mandates on planes here in the US. A lot of people are over the pandemic. I have a kid that's not vaccinated because he's so young, and I have to think about my obligations to that kid. So, look, it'd be fun for me to go do stuff on the trip. It'd be nicer not to have to wear a
11:59 Speaker 00 mask on the plane, but I have to think about what my obligations are to my son. Or more importantly, I, and, and this has been commonplace now, right? I'm the only one in a mask in a room. And I get it, right? I, I'm not saying that they should have to act any differently than they want to have to act, or that they, like, I'm thinking, they should make their own calculations. I have no thoughts on this whatsoever. But I have to be comfortable being the only person masked in the room, and people going, why are you wearing that? Or, I have to be okay, people not understanding what I'm doing. Maybe even as I'm saying this to you, right? I could have chosen another example, and, and probably one that more people would have agreed with or approved of. But that's sort of the point. I don't
12:44 Speaker 00 care what you think. I care what I think. I care about what I know, and I care about what I think my obligations are. And in this case, my obligations are, if I get sick because I did something yesterday, I can't do the gig tomorrow. If I get sick at the gig tomorrow, can't do the one after that, or the one after that. And that costs me money, and it also would be a betrayal of my obligations to those commitments that I've made. Then, more importantly, if I bring something home, when we're sort of on the, you know, so close to, well, not so close, it's taking forever. But, the point is, I've come this far. I'm not going to give up on that, because I feel like I have an obligation to my son, and it doesn't cost me much, right? Besides... What other people think, which I don't control. Right. And this is what Marcus is saying.
13:27 Speaker 00 We respect ourselves. We know what's important to us. We know what we value. So why do we care what other people think? Right. We don't control it and we have to get comfortable being judged. We have to be comfortable sitting with our own self estimation. We have to be comfortable with what we know is the right thing to do about what the results are of our decisions, about the impact we're trying to have. And that's what matters. And by the way, if you disagree with my opinion, guess what? Your opinion, you can keep it to yourself.
13:59 Speaker 00 Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.
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