The Daily Stoic - Be Brave Enough To Do This

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

We carry our own weight in this world, we blow our own nose, as Epictetus says. It’s what’s right, it’s what’s fair, it’s our job.💡 We designed The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders to mirror the kind of education that produced historically great leaders like Marcus Aurelius. Check it out at store.dailystoic.comGet The Daily Stoic Leadership Challenge: Ancient Wisdom For Modern Leaders & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets for London, Rotterdam, Dublin, Vancouver, and Toronto at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️ 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.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Daily Stoic early and ad free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. 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 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailysteilig.com. Be brave enough to do this.

It's jarring sometimes to read the Stoics. They feel so much like us, so timelessly and universally human in their reflections on life. And then you run smack into some offhanded mention of slavery or more commonly some misogynistic comment that hasn't aged very well. It also feels totally pointless and beneath someone as great as Seneca or Mark Ceruleus.

Doing anything womanly, be it woman's work or having a woman's emotions, this was seen as almost the ultimate slur to some of the Stoics. It seems strange that Cato, who went around deliberately challenging Rome's social conventions as a matter of self-discipline, would be so concerned with what other people thought of him.

But that's the thing about prejudices. They are so fundamentally irrational. And worse, they are almost always evidence of insecurity and fragility, which is to say the opposite of what stoicism is supposed to be. So it's wonderfully refreshing to read in the surviving fragments of Hierachles,

a much more modern and actualized prescription. Sure, men and women might have different activities they tend towards, but when speaking of weaving and other work around the home, Hierarchles asks why a man who is secure in himself cannot do them. If he writes through a life of this kind, he should have rendered himself free of every absurd suspicion. What will prevent a husband from sharing in these things too with his wife. We need to do what needs to be done, whatever our gender. We do it well, we do it earnestly, we do it without expecting the third thing,

as Marcus Aurelius describes gratitude, recognition. We do it without fearing judgment of other people's opinions because what do they matter? We carry our own weight in this world, we blow our own nose as Epictetus says, it's what's right, it's what's fair, it blow our own nose as Epictetus says, it's what's right. It's what's fair. It's our job.

It is the mark of leadership and also a virtue. Do you have it? This is something we actually talk about in the daily Stoke leadership challenge. Not only that leaders are leaders regardless of their gender, their background or their race, but that great leaders find a way to make all different types of people feel included. They draw on a diverse, robust team of people from different backgrounds, different styles, different lifestyles, and they model that what matters is you get the job done. It doesn't matter who you are. And in fact, how you do the job is what really determines who you are.

Nothing else. You can check that out at dailystoic.com slash leadership challenge. If you liked the daily stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on

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