If Only They Really Knew…

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• 0:03Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday 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, dailystoic.com.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  If only they really knew. Not everyone is going to like you, as we've talked about. There is no one, not even Marcus Aurelius, who was universally beloved during their lifetime or afterwards. It can be hard to accept this, but it's harder still sometimes, the reasons that they dislike you. People judge us for where we come from, for what we look like, for our age, for our religion. They dislike us for the work we do. They dislike us for what they heard about the work that we do. They dislike us for real, legitimate reasons, mistakes we've made, stands we've taken, and totally made up stuff. They project their own insecurities, their own issues onto us. They'll stick us with the consequences of their ignorance, their own poor comprehension skills, their

• 1:13Speaker 00

  own bad taste. Have you ever watched, as Kipling said, "The truths you've spoken get twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools"? It's a maddening, saddening thing. Epictetus, though, says that we should take all this with a smile. In fact, he joked that when we find ourselves criticized or disliked by some stranger, instead of trying to convert them or argue with them, we should just say to ourselves, "If only they really knew me, they'd like me even less." That people dislike us for their made-up, ridiculous reasons shouldn't bother us. Superficial, baseless criticism is not what we need to concern ourselves with. Instead, let us focus on what we know we can improve on, where we are not meeting our own standards. And if there's any external feedback we take,

• 1:57Speaker 00

  any approval we seek, let it come from the people who know us well, who we admire. Epictetus would have taken it seriously if Musonius Rufus was upset with him, just like Marcus Aurelius would have never wanted to let him. Antoninus down. Everything else, we can ignore. [Music]