The Daily Stoic - If You Can’t Stand The Heat… | Don’t Get Mad, Help

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Ryan explains why you can’t let the external world define your perspective, and reads The Daily Stoic’s entry of the day, on today’s Daily Stoic Podcast.LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. 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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. 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 in 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 Epititus Markis, really a Seneca, then some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works. 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. If you can't stand the heat, it was Senika who reminds us that life is no soft of fair. Put aside his prescient warnings about fortune and adversity and difficulty, all of which feel rather relevant right now, and let's just focus on the world of ideas. The pursuit of wisdom is not an easy path. It's contentious.

It's filled with disagreements and unpleasant ideas. And so you better toughen yourself up because you're certainly gonna have more luck thickening your skin than you will making the world a nice and pleasant place. You snowflake. If you're gonna take a controversial view or even an ordinary stand in this life,

you better get ready because that stand is your problem. It's not everyone else's job to keep you feeling safe and supported. It's not the world's job to conform to your world view. On the contrary, truth is a battlefield. You better be prepared to fight, to defend, to be challenged because that's how ideas work. That's how truth is uncovered and vetted. Getting offended, that's your problem, your problem, that someone else dared to express their opinion. You don't like it, your problem, that the evidence is challenging what you like to believe, what you've gone on the record supporting, your problem, your problem. But as we said, it's also your opportunity to change

your mind, to engage, to discuss, to question, to learn, to reply, to grow. If you can't do that, if you can't stand the heat, well then get out of the kitchen and pack it in because this life is not for you. If you want to make that pursuit of wisdom a more active part of your life, I recommend the Daily Stoke Read to Lead Challenge, all sorts of great practices based on Stoke Philosophy that will help you become a better leader and as a result a better leader and I think a wiser and less fragile person.

You can check that out at dailystoke.com slash read and of course if you join Daily Stoke Life you get that course and all the other courses totally for free. We'd love to have you season. Don't get mad, get help. Are you angry when someone's armpit stanker when their breath is bad? What would be the point? Having such a mouth and such armpits there is going to be some smell. You say they must have sense, can't they tell how offensive they are? Well, you have sense too, So, congratulations. Use your natural

reason to awaken there. Show them. Call it out. The person will listen. Then you'll have cured them without useless anger. No drama or unseemly show required. Mark Cereleus' Meditations 528. And I'm reading to you today from the Daily Stoic 366 Meditations on Wisdom Perseverance in the Art of Living by yours truly. My co-author and translator, Steve Enhancelman, you can get signed copies by the way in the Daily Stoke store over a million copies of the Daily Stoke in print now. It's been just such a lovely experience to watch it. It's been more than 250 weeks, consecutive weeks on the best sellers.

It's just an awesome experience. But I hope you check it out. We have a premium leather edition at store.dailystoke.com as well. But let's get on with today's reading. I will say one of the benefits of the pandemic is I had not gotten on a plane since March 2020. And we'll say it was easier to be patient with people not having to sit in a small metal tube with them. And then for the launch of courage is calling, I did have to travel for the first time as vaccinated

into precautions, of course, but it was a reminder that, man, getting out there in the world, nothing equalizes us and reveals the flaws of the human species quite like the stresses and strains of travel. And although I wrote this now several years ago, I could have written it on the flights. I was just on. The person sitting next to you on the plane, the one who is loudly chattering and knocking around in your space, the one you're grinding your teeth about because they're, I don't know, not wearing their mask because they're clearly shouldn't be traveling because they

are encroaching in your seat. The one you are hating from the depths of your soul because they're rude, ignorant, and obnoxious. In these situations, you might feel it takes everything you have to restrain yourself from murdering them. But it's funny how that thought comes into our heads before, you know, politely asking them to stop, or making the minor scene of asking for a different seat. We'd rather be pissed off, bitter raging inside than risk an awkward conversation that might actually help this person and make the world a better place. We don't just want people to be better, we expect it to magically happen that we can

simply will other people to change burning holes into their skull with our angry stare. Although when you think about it that way, it does kind of make you wonder who the root one actually is. Again, traveling seems to bring out the worst in us. God forbid you ever get on a frontier or a spirit airlines flight. But the point is we jam ourselves in these stressful situations and we don't communicate. I think it's a decent metaphor for life too. I mean, so often I feel like any time I'm in a argument with my wife or I lose my cool with my kids, it's because something's been building, building, building and I haven't up about it, and I didn't take the time to be patient and self-controlled. Earlier, speak up, adjust things, communicate, and then I'm acting like it's their fault that I'm upset.

Right? And this is what we do. Have you ever actually said, hey, could you not recline your seat, or hey, that's my armrest, or hey, you just spilled that all all over me or hey, you're snoring really, really loud. I remember I was on a flight a couple years ago, it was a red eye flight from Milan to Brazil and we took off at like, we were supposed to take off at five, we ended up taking off at like nine, it was super delayed. So like two hours into the flight, the people and the two seats next to me are chattering away as if it's, you know, not now late at night and this is the window to sleep.

And I remember just going, you know, I'm gonna say something. I'm just like, hey, I'm like exhausted. Is there any way you can keep it down? And they were like, oh my gosh, we totally forgot about, we forgot, we were wired, we blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they were so nice and quiet. Because I actually set it politely. I didn't store my anger and then vomit all over them.

I didn't store it up and then not be able to sleep because I was so angry. I just spoke up, I said it kindly, patiently. Remember, you can do these things kindly. It does take some courage and self control to speak up to say what you think, to ask for what you need. That is an important part. And then you never know, look,

they could have responded like jerks. And oftentimes people do respond like jerks. But this too is an opportunity to practice some of those same virtues again. So don't stew, don't resent, don't be bitter, don't expect they magically know, you know, they could be going through something, they could be dealing with something, they could also, and this is the case, have no freaking clue that what they're doing is causing a negative

externality for anyone else, although again, you shouldn't recline your seat on airplanes. It's just a basic kindness. You're taking space from the person behind you, and then people go, but I could, but they could just do it to the person behind them. That's exactly why a stoic doesn't recline their seat, but I'm getting off on attention. Anyways, do the right thing, speak up, or, you know, Mark's really says,

either instruct people or put up with them. So you got a choice. Be patient and endure it quietly without complaint or politely speak up, see if you can reach them, see if you can make a difference and then move on. All right, let's, although I, one other thing I would say that the pandemic has brought up about this is clearly, we as a society have tolerated obscene and totally unacceptable behavior towards waiters and flight

attendance and grocery store clerks and all and it was only the pandemic that really revealed just how dependent we are on these people and just how they're putting their ass on the line every day for us and then you're gonna go all caring on them and treat them like crap, not acceptable. So I would say you have to be patient, but the thing you can't accept is other people treating other people crapily and you certainly don't wanna be that person yourself.

rant over, be well everyone. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoke podcast. Again, if you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. You just go to dailystoke.com slash email. So check it out dailystoke.com slash email. 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 Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey there listeners!

While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduke Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from the ground to heat in cool homes,

or even figuring out how to make drinking water from air and sunlight. Together they discuss their entire journey from day one, and all the skills they had to learn along the way, like confronting big challenges, and how to lead through uncertainty. So if you want to get inspired and learn how to think like an entrepreneur, check out how I built this, wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and add free on the Amazon or Wonder yet.