The Daily Stoic - How Much Did They Take You For? | Practice Gentleness Instead of Anger

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

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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 Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our 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. How much did they take you for? With pride, we might pull up our account balances and look at how much wealth we've accumulated. We can survey our estates or our accomplishments. We can see what we've purchased and earned,

but it's much harder to track what all this has cost us. Seneca was constantly pointing this out, especially in regards to the most precious resource we have. Time. Stop, he advised. Reckon how much of your time has been taken up by a money lender, how much by a mistress, a patron, a client, quarreling with your wife, punishing their slaves, dashing about the city on your social obligations. Suddenly you don't seem so rich, do you? In fact, you look a little bit like a mark.

You've been con and robbed and had your pocket picked. Not a few times, but constantly. And worse, you allowed it to happen. No one is rich enough to sustain this very long. Each of us is on this planet for an uncertain but finite period. And you're going to let them take from this small pile of minutes and hours with impunity. You're going to leave the safe unlocked, leave the door wide open. Soon you will be broke and dying and you will rue the day you allowed yourself to be so abused and so abused yourself. It's not that life is short, Seneca says, it's that we waste a lot of it.

The practice of Memento Mori, the meditation on death, is one of the most powerful and eye-opening things that there is. You built this Memento Morory calendar for Dio Stoke to illustrate that exact idea that your life in the best case scenario is 4,000 weeks. Are you gonna let those weeks slip by or are you going to seize them?

The act of unrolling this calendar, putting it on your wall and every single week that bubble is filled in, that black mark is marking it off forever. Have something to show, not just for your years, but for every single dot that you filled in that you really lived that week, that you made something of it. You can check it out at dailystoward.com slash M-M calendar. Practice gentleness instead of anger.

It's easy to imagine Marcus really is losing his temper. His responsibilities were vast and his job required him to work with many frustrating difficult people. As such, he had an acute sense of the problem of anger, knowing just how counterproductive it can be and how miserable it can make its users. He often repeated a simple exercise designed to preserve goodwill for others by simply replacing anger with gentleness. We can't allow ourselves to desert our goodwill and we must remind ourselves that no one makes mistakes willingly. Each time you feel anger this week, remember Marcus, see how you might replace it with gentleness and write some examples down. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, 366 days of writing on reflection in the art of living.

I think I'm on my fourth or my fifth way through the book. Every day I do the little prompt. For instance, tomorrow's prompt is to what service am I committed? July 17th is where have I abandoned others? Can I mind my own business and not be distracted? It's, this is a great question to meditate on each day and write about. And we have some quotes here from Marcus. As you move forward along the path of reason, people will stand in your way. They will never be able to keep you from doing what sound, so don't let them knock out your good will. Keep a steady watch on both friends, not only for well-based judgments and actions, but also for gentleness with those who would obstruct our path or create difficulties. Forgetting angry is a weakness, just as much as abandoning the task or surrendering

to panic. That's Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 11-9. Then in Meditations 763, he quotes Plato. As Plato said, every soul is deprived of truth against its will. The same holds true for justice, self-control, and good will to others, every similar virtue. It's essential to constantly keep this in your mind for it will make you more gentle for all. And finally, Meditations 11, 18, he says, keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on. It's not manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human and therefore manlier.

A real man doesn't give way to anger or discontent. Such a person has strength, courage and endurance. So let's put aside these sort of gender preconceptions, as the stoics are obviously from a long, long time ago, but I think he's saying that it's not impressive to lose your temper, to be aggressive, to be mean, to be domineering, to destroy or dunk or own on someone. He's saying that the most impressive thing is to keep under the body, as the Bible says, to keep in self-control, to not lose your temper. Because to lose your temper has almost invariably to make the situation worse.

Not only is it impotent and pointless and never solves the problem, but it usually makes things worse. That's another thing Marcus says. He says, how much worse the consequences of anger are than the things that caused it. And I've said this before, but I've never lost my temper and then felt so glad that I did it.

Actually just yesterday, I was going back and forth with this person that we hired to do something a very expensive person, and they'd been like jerking us around for months. And, you know, I finally laid out and very clear simple English. This is what I want. This is what has to happen.

Stop wasting our time. And then three seconds later, they responded like, well, actually, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, let's get on the phone and discuss. And I've said this before, by hate getting on the phone, especially with things that don't need to be gotten on the phone about. And so there's part of me that wanted to write this

really angry email. And instead of doing that, instead of calling this person yelling with them, I called someone I work with, and I said, look, I'm calling you instead of yelling at this person. Here's where I am, here's what I want. It's obvious that I'm upset. This person knows I'm upset. Why don't you call them and just work out a solution

so we never have to talk about this again, right? Just make this go away, solve it. I don't need to get the last word here. I just want this to go away. And that's how I try to solve things that are upsetting to me. And I try to have some self-awareness of like, I know what I'm gonna do is this,

and then what they're gonna do is this, and then I'm gonna be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be. And then I will be unhappy. And this person probably won't feel any of it because if they were aware of what's happening, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with. So that's how I try to think about it. You want to catch yourself before you go through it.

You want to use it as an opportunity for the next level. I'm not quite there as Marcus is saying. It's try to respond with gentleness. Where is this person coming from? And that's actually something that I talked about with my partner. We were like, there's got to be something going on with this person because it doesn't make any sense. This is ridiculous. And I suspect that is maybe they're going through it. A voice

maybe their kid is sick. Maybe they their their business is falling apart. Just you don't know what people are going through. So to scream it then and yell at them, not only is it probably not going to solve anything, but they're probably overwhelmed already and that's why you're in this mess. So take a minute, remember it's more impressive to be controlled, you don't have to say, you don't have to get the last word, you don't have to get angry, solve the problem, move on, practice gentleness instead of anger. Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal.

We'll take time and effort, it won't be free. But by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable in life changing. So take the first step on the path to a calmer and more fulfilling future. Check out Taming Your Temper, the 10-day Stoic Guide to controlling your anger, you can just go to dailystoic.com slash anger. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery

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