You can't waste your time thinking about what other people are doing or saying, Marx really says in meditation. He says, unless of course it impacts the common good. He's saying because when you're focused on what other people are thinking, what other people are doing, what you're neglecting is what you're thinking, what you're doing, what's going on. on in here, which is the one thing that you actually have some control over. And this is a critical Stoic lesson.
You focus on what we control so we can make a difference there. One of the main things we don't control what the Stoics talk about a lot is what other people think and say about us. I'm Ryan Holiday.
I've not only written all these books about Stoic philosophy, I've been lucky enough to talk about it at the NBA and the NFL, sitting senators and special forces leaders. And it's key that we learn how to not care what other people say and think. We can imagine Marcus Aurelius has his share of critics. He also has the people whose approval he craves. He says to himself, tranquility comes when you stop caring what other people say and think and care only about what you do and say and think.
And in today's episode, we're gonna talk about the Stoic art of not caring what other people think. We don't compare ourselves to others because we don't control other people. The Stoics say it's what's in your control versus what's outside of your control. What's inside your control is the work that you do, the situations that you're in.
And when you start to say, oh but that person has more than me, or why do they have that, now you're getting into envy and jealousy. You're stealing joy and happiness from yourself. Marx really says that happiness is about tying yourself to what you do and say, not what other people do and say. The books have this word, euthymia, which means tranquility.
And Seneca says, well, what is that tranquility? How does one get it, right? It's not you retreat to the mountains or a monastery or some beautiful resort, right? He says, euthymia in the core.
of life has to come from something else. He defines this euthymia as, he says, a sense of the path that you're on without being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours, even from those, especially from those who are hopelessly lost. So you think about the interchanges and the connections. You think about all the other companies doing what you do, going in similar directions. Think about what's happening in the industry, in the world.
It's very easy to get distracted, right? When I was at American Apparel, I watched Dove destroy a billion-dollar company because instead of doing what he did well, what the company was meant to do, He started doing what Forever 21 was doing and Urban Outfitters was doing and H&M was doing, right? He lacked the discipline to stay on his path. He got distracted by the paths of those who crisscrossed him, even when some of those companies ultimately also were headed towards bankruptcy or having to reinvent themselves. So it takes a lot of discipline to know what you do, right?
What makes you great, what your principles are, what your place in the market is, and to stay on that and to not get distracted. right to not get distracted by every shiny other thing and so euthymia is not just a recipe for personal happiness tranquility but it's also a recipe for success right staying in your lane staying on your tracks doing what you set out to do if you're into your strategic plan your mission your principles this takes an enormous amount of discipline Epictetus said that we have to put every impression to the test. Your therapist might say you have to ask yourself is this assumption true, right? Because the reality is a lot of what we implicitly or instantly believe in a situation is preposterous. Sometimes we're telling ourselves that people don't like us, but if we actually look at their behavior, they actually do like us.
Or if we actually ask them, they would say that they do, right? We make these assumptions and these assumptions, it turns out, are not really based on anything. So we have to put that impression up to the test.
We have to ask ourselves, is this actually true? Why do I believe it? What evidence do I have for it? And this should help us from falling prey to false impressions, false beliefs, false assumptions.
Let's go to what's true, not what our mind made up in a moment of weakness or doubt or confusion. I moved to New Orleans more than 10 years ago. I lived in this little apartment building. And one of the things I did when I moved here was I didn't tell a single person that I was writing a book for two stoke reasons. Number one, I found out afterwards that a bunch of my friends here thought that I just didn't have a job.
They thought I was basically just... a bum. They had no idea I was working on a book, which is an important stoic concept.
Epictetus says, if you wish to improve, if you wish to become good at something, you must be content to be seen as stupid or foolish. I didn't care what anyone thought about me. I knew the work that I was doing. I knew that it would pay off eventually. And when the announcement came out, everyone was surprised.
Oh, Ryan was working on something. He wasn't just hanging out in his apartment. And then number two, a stoic doesn't talk about it.
A stoic is about it. I've always believed that talking about what you're doing and doing it fight for the same resources. So I didn't want to get credit.
for writing a book. I didn't want people to ask me about the book. I didn't want validation. for the book.
I wanted to spend every day actually working on the project. That's what paid off. That's what put me on the track that I eventually got on. That's why I never talk about what I'm doing until after I've done it, and you probably shouldn't either.
In one of the greatest essays ever written, I think one of her most stoic pieces of writing, the novelist Joan Didion, this is actually her table, I'm sitting in a chair that was once in her house, she said that self-respect frees us from the expectation of others. She says it gives us back to ourselves. And that's the great singular power of self-respect. You realize that respect isn't something you get from other people. Respect comes from in here, right?
And by respecting oneself whole... holding oneself to a certain standard, having a certain character, knowing one's worth and value, what you will do, what you won't do. From this emanates a kind of confidence that makes one worthy of respect. The Stoics have this great concept. It's actually in a play about Cato.
Its founding fathers were fond of it. They were saying nothing can guarantee you success, but there's something better still that's deserving it, being worthy of it. And I think that's the idea. Having respect of other people is great.
Obviously, Cato. Cato appreciated the fact that people saw him as Cato. But what mattered was that he was actually worthy of it, that he lived a life that he was a person worthy of that success. And that starts from how he saw himself. That starts from the character that he cultivated.
And the same is true for us. If good work comes from being present, it's preventing your ability from like actually being great on the television show that you're on. You're spending energy out in the world on stuff that doesn't matter instead of being like, I'm going to be the best that I can be in the thing that I am.
100%. If you are constantly dwelling on other people's opinions, if you're constantly dwelling on other people's success, it will 100% diminish your capability of doing good work. Just no ifs, ands, or buts about it because the mind has a certain amount of bandwidth. And the way I always...
express this when I talk to people about it. I go, look at it like a number. If you had a hundred bandwidth, like if your bandwidth was 100 and then someone said something mean to you on Twitter and you read that and responded and you're going back and forth. Now, how much do you have?
I bet you got about 30 is gone. 30% is just dedicated to this thing. It might be 40. Now, whatever work you are actually trying to do is greatly diminished because you don't have the focus.
Sometimes because of issues from our childhood, things we're struggling with, maybe just we're going through a hard time. We can get in a bad or even a dangerous feedback loop. We're not just consumed with what other people think of us. Even our own thoughts are giving us trouble.
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You can click the link in this video's description or visit betterhelp.com slash daily stoic. When you find yourself being criticized by someone, Marcus Rillo says, you have to get inside of them. Look in their soul.
Look at what kind of person they are, he says. And then you'll find you won't strain to impress them so much, right? It's like that line in Fight Club about how we spend all our time.
time and energy trying to impress people who we don't even like, who we don't even respect. It's kind of insane if you think about it. So when you think about the approval of the people that you are craving, that you are chasing, you realize who they are, you realize what they actually value, you realize how wrong they are all the time. It just can't be. counts the amount of energy and focus you're going to spend on trying to make them like you.
His point was that we too often accept the disapproval of, say, a hater without actually seeing who this hater is. What have they ever actually done, right? Do they have any real expertise here at all? Do they know what we're trying to do, right? They're judging us for a mistake that we made, for a weakness we have, but maybe their weaknesses are way worse, right?
That's a very silly way to do it. So you have to look at this person whose approval you want. You feel like you're no good because you didn't go to Harvard. Look at the people.
people who have gone to Harvard, right? Look at the people who have not gone to Harvard. Does this actually say anything about you? Look at the problems, the mistakes that institution had made, and is it really that important for it to reflect on you? Zeno's the founder of stoicism.
He had this social... Anxiety. Someone said he was sort of stubby, he had weird legs, kind of a weird appearance.
And he had this mentor, this philosopher mentor named Crates. And Crates realized that Zeno was too self-conscious. He cared too much about what other people thought about him.
And he thought people were looking at him all the time. So he asked him to carry this large cauldron of soup across town. And he knew that Zeno would be mortified at the idea.
So he caught Zeno kind of like trying to sneak around, take it on these back roads or do it at night. So Crades was following them and right as he was in front of some people he hit the pot with his staff and it spilled the soup all over Zeno. And of course Zeno was all embarrassed and he ran off and he said, Where are you going my friend? Don't you realize nothing has happened to you? And his point was that no harm has actually befallen you just because some people are looking and skew at you or none of these people know who you are, they don't care, they're immediately going to forget this event.
I think what the Stoics realized is that, one, naturally we're self-conscious. So they're not denying that you care what other people think or how you're being seen. But they actively practiced not being shamed by these things. Cato, for instance, would walk around bareheaded. He would walk around barefooted.
He wore ratty clothes, even though he could afford the finest garments. And he did this because he was trying to make himself immune. He was trying to inoculate himself against caring. about what other people think. And so I think the real benefit of that, if you look at Cato's life, is that towards the end, when everyone was so afraid of Julius Caesar, when everyone was going along with what Julius Caesar wanted to do, Cato was the one who was comfortable standing alone.
He was the comfortable being the odd man out. He was comfortable, you know, people being mad at him and saying, why can't you go along to get along? Why are you being like this?
Why are you being such an asshole? He had the strength and the confidence to do the right thing when everyone else was afraid because he'd actively practiced practiced not caring so much about what other people think. So look, I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying I don't catch myself doing it too, but it's something you work on and you get better at.
And so it's important to realize that Stoicism then is a practice. It's a process. It's not just a bunch of ideas. It's something you engage in the way that Crates was for Zeno, and of course, the way that Cato was in his philosophical practice as well.
It's strange. We not only care about other people's opinions, we care about the opinions of people in the future who we will never meet, who will be dead before or ever walk this earth. Marx really says, you know, people who long for posthumous fame, they forget not only are they not going to be around to enjoy it, but the people in the future will be just as dumb and silly and ridiculous and obsessed with fads and valuing the wrong things as people right now.
So what matters is what you think. He says, we love ourselves more than other people, but we care about their opinion more than our own. It's insane. You know what's right.
You know what you value. You know what's important. You know what your principles are.
That's what you have to measure yourself against. What you're capable of, what you're trying to do. External approval, external validation, external results.
That's secondary. How many views this does, that's not important. Did I say what I wanted to say?
Did I do what I wanted to do? Did I bring my best self to it? That's what matters. It's one of the most frustrating things in the entire world. You do the right thing, you treat people well, you hold yourself to a certain high standards, and then what happens?
People talk shit about you. People steal from you. People screw you over. That's how it goes.
Kipling says, can you bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools. Mark Cerullo says they'll cut you with knives, they'll stab you in the back, they'll shower you with curses, they'll argue in bad faith. But then he says, but what? Does that cut your mind off from the truth? from clearness and sanity and self-control and justice?
No, to the Stokes, it doesn't matter what other people do. It doesn't matter if you're not recognized and rewarded for doing the right thing. You stay on the path that you know is true and good. You stay true and good anyway, because to betray it is to add insult on top of injury. When someone criticizes me, I do this exercise for Marcus Uriola, he says, think about this person.
Think about what they just submitted to. Think about who they are. Think about what they're addicted to.
Think about what they've ever accomplished. And what you realize is that this person whose opinion you were about to let supersede your own evaluation of yourself and your work is actually worse than meaningless. They're like the opposite of who you're trying to be. So it's good that they don't like what you're doing.
You don't want their approval. Focus on what you think. Focus on who you think. who you want to be. As he says, we love ourselves more than other people, but then for some reason, we care about other people's opinions more than our own.
That's insanity. You got to focus on who you are, on your own internal scorecard, on your sense of self. That's what you measure yourself against, not the nonsense of other people, not the worthless opinions.
These people who, quite frankly, you don't respect anyway. If you want more wisdom inspired from the Stoics, I send out one Stoic-themed email every single morning, totally for free. You can sign up at dailystoic.com slash email. No spam.
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