The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: How Does a Stoic Deal with Aggressive People?

Episode Date: March 7, 2020

Ryan talks about the new Daily Stoic offices, reads a selection from The Obstacle is the Way, and answers your questions.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at alestowac.com. new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to Business Wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ryan Holiday.

I am sitting here in the new Daily Stoic offices. I don't want to spoil that too much as a bunch is coming related to that. But we are in the process of setting up our new office. My desk is here. And one of the first things I put at the desk, I'm staring at it right now, is a small bust I have of Marcus Aurelius. It was, I think I bought this right before I started writing the obstacles away. It was made in 1820 out of career and marble. And when I sort of sit and write it kind of catches my eye and one of the things I like to think about it is that somebody made this 200 years ago and I think about whose desk it's probably sat on or you know somewhere in someone's house that it sat,

what it meant to them, how many generations of people, 200 years is, and at the same time, how instantaneous that is, and actually as I was sitting here thinking I was gonna talk to you guys about this, I looked up an email that we'd written when I first started the Daily Stoic Daily email and it turned out I wrote this in October 2016. So four years have passed even since then, like when I was writing it, I was like, you know, 1820, that's almost 200 years. But even, you know, four years have passed

since then. So time is this sort of force that's like, you know, tick, ticking away. And yet, these sort of certain ideas or examples or people kind of stand eternal. And I think, to me, that's why I have it on my desk. That's what I love about it. That's why it's sort of served as good inspiration for the writing. And there's a passage from Matthew Arnold that I really love. We've used it a bunch of times but he says long after his death, his bust, Marcus Reelius, was to be seen in the houses of private men through the wide Roman Empire. It may be the vulgar part of human nature which busys itself with assemblance and doings of living sovereigns. It is the nobler part which busies itself with those of the dead. These busts of Marcus Aurelius in the homes of Gaul, Britain, and Italy bear witness, not to the

intimate frivolous curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of the passage of a great man upon the earth. And when I look at that small bust of Marcus Aurelius, I try to make sure that my actions honor his memory. I try to think that I want the writing that I do to live up to that example. And yeah, this is just this sort of timeless, stoic practice, the importance of finding examples or exemplars, as Sena Kasa, choosing yourself a Cato and then displaying their presence in the places that you frequent. And so actually behind this little one, the one I have is maybe about four inches tall.

I also have a much, much larger bust that ES Schubert gave me. He's the artist we worked with on the Marx-Release Bus we made for Daily Stoke, but he gave me a big one. It's like, it's not quite life-sized, but I bet his heads about the size of a cantaloupe, and this thing is heavy. It's made of puter and bronze, I think. It's big, and so I have them both now on my desk.

They're like sort of the most prominent things. I try to keep kind of generally an empty desk, but I have this there, and I love it, and that's the example. And so it's something we've written about. Obviously we sell our version of the statue in the daily stoke store, but oh, I wanted to talk about this. I really do think the idea is important. Who are your heroes? What do you have up on the wall? How is that example sort of living in your daily life? And actually, sort of on the other side of my desk on the wall, the first picture that I put up is a picture that the painter Garland

Robinette. He was a broadcaster in New Orleans. He became a friend of mine after I wrote Trust Me Am Lying that he painted for me. It's like a juji doll, so it's a sort of New Orleans like voodoo doll character and then inside of it it's a picture of one of my favorite writers, the novelist Walker Persley, who happened to be a fan of stoicism. And so, as I'm decorating this office as I'm setting up, what I'm going to look at on a daily basis as I come to work and write, I want the ideas and the ideals and the people I admire to be embodied in some tangible form. And as I've gone around to give talks and meet with interesting people over the world,

that is something that I found they all have in common. If you speak at a sports team, they got the cultural values on the wall. They got jerseys of the people who've gone pro or whose jerseys have been retired. They are holding up the examples of the people they admire and believe in. And that's something I believe in. And then I just wanted to pass along to you guys.

So we'll get right into it. Today's reading is a little passage from the obstacle is the way. It's actually from the discipline of the action section. One of my favorite chapters. This is on Amelia Earhart. It's about getting up and getting moving and getting started. Amelia Earhart wanted to be a great aviator, but it was the 1920s,

and people still thought that women were frail and weak and didn't have the stuff. Women's suffrage was not even a decade old. She couldn't make her living as a pilot, so she took a job as a social worker than one day the phone rang. The man on the line had a pretty offensive proposition along the lines of, we have someone willing to fund

the first female transatlantic flight. Our first choice is already backed out. You won't actually get to fly the plane and we're going to send two men along a shaperones and guess what? We'll pay them a lot of money and you won't get anything. Oh, and you might very well die doing it. Do you know what she said to that offer? She said, yes, because that's what people who defy the odds do. That's how people who become great at things, whether it's flying or blowing through gender stereotypes do. They start anywhere, anyhow. They don't care if the conditions are perfect or if they're being slated, because they know that once they get started,

if they can just get some momentum, they can make it work. And that's how it went for Amelia Earhart. Less than five years later, she was the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic and became rightly one of the most famous and respected people in the world. But none of that would have happened

as she turned up her nose at that offensive offer or sat around feeling sorry for itself. None of it could have happened if she'd stopped after that first accomplishment either. What mattered was that she took the opening and pressed ahead. That was the reason for her success. Life can be frustrating.

Oftentimes we know what our problems are. We may even know what to do about them. But we fear that taking action is too risky, that we don't have the experience, or that's not how we pictured it, or because it's too expensive, because it's too soon, because we think something better might come along, because it might not work. And you know what happens as a result? Nothing, we do nothing. Tell yourself that the time for that has passed. The wind is rising. The bells been rung. Get started. Get moving. We often assume that the world moves at our leisure.

We delay when we should initiate. We jog when we should be running or better yet sprinting. And then we're shocked, shocked when nothing big ever happens, when opportunities never show up, when new obstacles begin to pile up, where the enemies finally get their act together. Of course they did. We gave them room to breathe. We gave them a chance. So the first step is to take the bat off your shoulder and give it a swing. You've got to start to go anywhere.

For some reason these days we tend to downplay the importance of aggression, of taking risks, of barreling forward, of compromise. It's probably because it's been negatively associated with certain notions of violence or masculinity. But of course, Earhart shows that that isn't true. In fact, on the side of her plane, she painted the words always think with your stick forward. That is, you can't ever let up your flying speed if you do, you crash. Be deliberate, of course. But you always need to be moving

forward. You can listen to the audiobook of the obstacles the way it's available on Amazon. Tim Ferris was actually nice enough to be the one who published it. I did the reading, but it is a great book if you want to check it out. What I think is always interesting about this passage is I tell us this version of the story and a lot of the talks that I give. And I remember I was giving a talk in San Francisco to text start up and I told the story of Amelia Earhart and afterwards I was on Twitter, which I shouldn't have been. But I saw this woman who'd been in the audience got very, very upset that I told this story. She had somehow taken the message from this story that women should just take what's offered to them.

That this was somehow a story about settling, which to me it's the exact opposite of it, and I think sort of it's kind of emblematic of the exact mentality that I was trying to attack in the thing that I think that Emilia Earhart so wonderfully embodies, which is that you can't make progress if you don't get started. If you wait for the perfect opportunity, if you wait to be treated fairly, you have to take what you want in this life. You have to take what's yours. And we are indebted to people like Amelia Earhart, to people who have that sort of stoic ability to endure slights and disrespect the way that Jackie Robinson did, the way that Emilia

Earhart did, and are willing to take an inch, turn it into a mile, and prove just how wrong the vast majority of people have been. And that requires, I think, with the message of that section of the book is about, which is about taking action, doing the work, the message of that section of the book is about, which is about taking action, doing the work, getting momentum, and then as Emilia Earhart said, always thinking with your stick forward. That means progress, not perfection. So get out there, get moving. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like.

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Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoic. You ask your questions, we answer them. You send them in at info at dailystoic.com. How does a stoke deal with aggressive people? Or how should we respond to sort of bad evil, mean unpleasant people? I don't think the stokes had any illusions about their fellow man.

Marcus Realis talks about, he opens a book two of meditations with a sort of a meditation on how awful some of the people he's going to meet today. But later in the books, he talks about how, look, there are going to be people who gouge and bite you in the ring, who cheat. And you can choose to be upset by this, you could choose to be frustrated by this. We can understand that that's like kind of a certain type of person in the world. And that you have to keep your guard up around them, you have to adjust your fight strategy accordingly, but you can't let it get to you and you certainly can't make it, let it make you quit. And so, Marx really is, let the Roman army in war,

Marx really is what have sentenced people to death, he would have, you know, adjudicated, very complicated, unpleasant legal cases with examples of humanity doing awful things to each other. So there's a sort of pragmatism and a realism in stoicism in a sense that what has to be done has to be done. You know, Marx really talks about wrestling and fighting and boxing, but I don't think he just meant in the sort of confines of the ring.

It's like, look, sometimes, you know, violence is necessary. We worked on this book at Braschek a couple years ago, it's kind of Tim Larkin and he said, and I'm getting a little bit away from a question, but I think it's worth pursuing because the Stokes were not utopians. They were not believe that everyone was good and that everyone would be nice. But Tim Larkin's great line, he says, you know, violence is rarely the answer, but when it is the answer, it's the only answer. And I think that kind of encapsulates the stoke approach, which is that you try to be good, you try to give people the benefit out, you try to do the right thing always, but sometimes it gets real, and sometimes that is required.

Thankfully, we live in a society today where we have a volunteer army rather than a general citizen's army, and so people have taken it upon themselves to do those things for us. We have police. We have authorities. We've government agencies that sort of step in between us and some of the things that, you know, earlier times we would have had

to handle ourselves. But I guess my answer to this question is sort of long, windy way, is that you deal with aggressive people as they are required to be dealt with. You always try to to comport yourself with the standards that you believe in, you try to do the right thing. And then, you know, sometimes,

sometimes you got to do more than that. Jeremiah's question is, if I had any suggestions for applying stochism to learning a foreign language that he wants to learn Japanese to speak with his children, and he has motivations, but he doesn't enjoy the process of learning. It's very boring and difficult, and how can I use stosism to overcome this? First off, good for you. I think there's a great question. I think you're wonderful for trying to do what you're doing. I am not good at languages.

I speak mediocre Spanish. But I have liked using Dulingo. I'm actually using Dulingo right now to try to learn some Latin. That's something I thought would sort of improve my game as a writer and a thinker this year if I could be closer to understanding some of the languages that right now I only sort of hear about

and experience secondhand. I found the sort of gamification of the app to be fun and beneficial. So I might just look at sort of different people who have experimented with different strategies for learning. I guess sometimes people go, like, as an example, we found with books. It's like, I love books.

Books come easy to me. I think reading is easy. I love the smell and the touch and the feel of a book. But what we realized is that not everyone feels the same way. That's why we do this podcast. That's why we make the YouTube videos. That's why we do this podcast. That's why we make the YouTube videos. That's why we have the Instagram account. And so sometimes we can assume that things should only be done a certain way, and then

we're just supposed to grid our teeth and sort of white knuckle through a difficult process. Maybe there's different learning methodologies that you should check out. Maybe it's Dulingo, maybe it's hiring a tutor, maybe it's taking classes, maybe it's spending time in Japan. I don't know what it is, but I think one of the things, like experiment, try. Put yourself out there, take some risks. Don't just think that sheer effort is the only way to get through this.

The Stokes were big on tutors, obviously, I think each one of the Stokes, the famous Stokes, has pretty well-known tutor. And so maybe thinking about, yeah, investing in someone to guide you through this process. Who's your master? Who's your instructor? Just doing it alone might be where you're struggling. And then the last thing I would think about is don't just think about that you're learning a language. Think about how you're learning to teach yourself new

things, how you're learning to be a better father, how you're learning to be a better person. Also, sort of give yourself credit for the process that you're going through, and that, yeah, it's supposed to be hard, but that's because you're learning two skills at the same time. You're learning to speak Japanese, but you're also learning how to learn Japanese, which for you may actually be the harder thing. So that's just maybe an interesting way to think about it. Prana is asking, what kind of meditation can one practice in order to become more calm and resilience? Can you elaborate on the role of meditation and mindfulness? So you might think as someone who wrote a book called Stillness is the Key that I'm very much

that I'm a big meditator. I'm not. I struggle with it. It doesn't really do that much for me. For me, meditation and mindfulness comes best when I run, when I swim, when I walk, when I do active things. So that's the kind of meditation that I practice. I occasionally do some sort of breath exercises or I'll count my breath. I like to do it sets of 30. I count one, two, three, up to 30. I start over and over again.

Sometimes I'll do that like when I'm in a steam room or a sauna. It feels very sort of Greek and Roman to me. This is, you know, we know the Stokes spend a lot of time in these baths. But I would just experiment with the different apps, calm.com is great. There's different apps that you can try and work with. But if it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. There's other ways to do it. I would just think about the Stokes and that they never use the word meditations. When Marcus really calls his book, Meditations, or that's the name,

it wasn't thinking about meditation or our context, he was thinking about a conversation with himself. So journaling is that form of meditation. For Marcus really, as it seems, you know, Seneca talks about his nightly review, Kato seemed to have these kind of long, flowing conversations in dinner parties, others still expect time alone reading or time hunting or time doing lots of different things. So, I'm always reluctant to say meditation is this one thing. You should do it this way.

I don't think that's the stoke tradition. And so, I'm just reluctant to fit you in that box if it's not working for you. So another question we have here is how to properly apologize for mistakes. He says, how do I properly apologize for mistakes I've committed and the wrong doings that had an impact on a person's life, which were committed either intentionally

or unintentionally before I was introduced to stosism? I mean, this seems pretty straightforward to me. You apologize. You mean it sincerely. You actually take some time to think about how this I mean, this seems pretty straightforward to me. You apologize. You mean it sincerely. You actually take some time to think about how this affected another person. You don't think about how it affected you.

You don't think about why you did it. You think about how it affected that other person, how that must have felt to be them. And you apologize and you address that and you mean it. And then you have to understand that all you can do is offer the apology. You can't make them accept it. You can't make them forgive you. And it's not fair for you to demand or expect those things. All you can do is give a heartfelt expression of your feelings, give them a commitment of how

you want to do better in the future, the path that you're on, what's been learned from this process, and hope that they accepted and ultimately give them the space to accept it. That's really all that you can do. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. And if you don't get the Daily Stoke email, go to dailystoke.com slash email.