A Sign You’re Making Progress | It's In Your Self-Interest

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1:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic, my book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

1:45A sign you're making progress. If you're wondering if you're getting better, wiser, more philosophical in this Stoic journey, here's a test. How many arguments are you getting in each day? How often are you fighting with others? We talked about Elon Musk a while ago. Imagine having 10 kids, billions of dollars, seven companies, tens of thousands of employees, a real opportunity to write a better future, and spending your time seeking out culture war issues to get sucked into. Imagine engaging with random trolls online, getting into spats with journalists and politicians. You might think that that sounds pretty silly, but are we really that much better?

2:24in our own smaller lives. The beautiful and good person neither fights with anyone, Epictetus says in discourses. The meaning of an education, of philosophy, he says, is learning what is your own affair and what is not. If a person carries themselves so, where is any room for fighting, he says. If stoicism is not freeing you from endless online outrage, if it is not making you less distracted, less of a busy body, less contentious, what is it doing for you? The whole point of philosophy is to make you self-sufficient, self-actualized, self-aware. This isn't to say that agreeableness is a goal in life, but certainly acceptance and tolerance is.

3:02Minding your own business, focusing on what truly matters, being kind, being patient, keeping an open mind. These are all byproducts of the virtues, a sign that you're making progress as a stoic. A sign of progress is that you're losing your temper less, that if you haven't tamed it entirely, it's more in your control than it was before. And that's one of our best courses here at Daily Stoic. One of the best things you can do to get your anger under control is just care less about stuff that doesn't matter, spend less time getting sucked into fights that escalate and escalate and ratchet and ratchet until you're screaming or yelling or whatever, right?

3:38Huge part of it. It's a big part of what we talk about in the Tame at Your Temper course. 10 days of challenges, exercises, video lessons, and bonus tools based on Stoic philosophy. materials to help you deal with your anger in a constructive manner. We will give you the tools that you need, not just to manage your anger, but to leave it in the past so you can focus on what's important, living a virtuous and fulfilling life. You can learn the wisdom of the great thinkers and leaders of history through this course, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Abraham Lincoln, even Mr. Rogers, and many others. You'll be able to use our unique exercises to break free from the cage that anger has built around you and see the world and yourself in a new light.

4:20Each day, you'll be able to watch a new video from me, Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, Stillness is the Key, and of course, The Daily Stoic, as I explain the ideas behind the words and shed light on the path that you're on, but that I am also on. Because again, we are all struggling to tame our temper and we will all be better if we can get closer to that. Being able to control your anger is a difficult but worthwhile goal. will take time and effort, won't be free, but by changing your perspective and developing techniques to control your temper, it will ultimately be achievable and life-changing.

4:56So 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 click the link below or you can just go to dailystoic.com slash anger.

5:18August 23rd, it's in your self-interest. This is an entry from The Daily Stoic. I realized I'm recording at my house. I ran upstairs and I grabbed a copy of The Daily Stoic off the shelf. I was looking for one. And I think I found a first edition because it doesn't say bestseller list on it. It doesn't say how many copies were sold. And it's kind of got these yellowed pages. So pretty cool. This would have been the first edition that came out in 2016. Obviously, we've since printed millions of copies. It's in like 30 languages. You can even grab a leather edition at store.dailystoic.com, but I'll get to the entry, I promise.

5:54Today's quote is from Seneca's Moral Letters. Therefore, explain why a wise person shouldn't get drunk, not with words, but with the facts of its ugliness and offensiveness. It's most easy to prove that the so-called pleasures, when they go beyond proper measures, are but punishments. Is there a less effective technique to persuading people to do something than yelling at them? Is there anything that turns people off more than abstract notions? That's why the Stoics don't say, stop doing this, it's a sin. Instead, they say, don't do this because it will make you miserable. They don't say pleasure isn't pleasurable.

6:33They say endless pleasures become its own form of punishment. Their methods of persuasion hew the line in the 48 Laws of Power, appeal to people's self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude. If you find yourself trying to persuade someone to change or to do something differently, remember what an effective lever self-interest is. It's not that this or that is bad. It's that it's in their best interest to do it a different way and show them. Don't moralize. And think about what would happen if you apply this line of thinking to your own behavior. I've sometimes said the difference between Stoicism and Christianity is the Christian argument is like, hey, don't do these sins, don't violate these 10 commandments, or you could go to hell.

7:22And I realize this is a simplification, just bear with me. But the Stoic argument is, hey, if you do these things, and there's a similar probably list of things to do and not do, you will live in a kind of hell, right? The Stoics certainly would have saw people get ahead doing bad things, but they also would have seen how they pay for those quote unquote successes, right? That these were some of the most miserable people. Certainly this is what Epictetus realizes living in Nero's court. He goes, oh man, these people weren't lucky. They're not getting away with anything. It's horrible to be them.

7:59I wouldn't want to be them at all. I'm obviously thinking about this now that I have kids. When When you forbid someone from doing something or you just criticize something, what you're not doing is explaining the why. You're not demonstrating the why. And the Stoic argument is like, look, when you do something and you experience that bit of pleasure, you know, the pleasure passes quickly. But sometimes the shame or what you had to do to get it or the wrong you committed to get it, that endures. Meanwhile, the other side of the argument the Stoics would say is that when you do something hard or you resist or you push forward, that labor passes quickly.

8:42But the pride in it remains. The good lasts a little bit longer. You know, the Stoics would have tried to point out, yeah, look, I'm not saying that it's not fun to drink, but you got to think about what you're going to feel like tomorrow. You got to think about the road you're going down. I was just talking to someone about this, the idea of justice. You know, you were talking about this like bit of paperwork he had to fill out. And, you know, if you put one number, he had to pay a certain amount of tax. If you moved the number a little lower, it was less tax. And we weren't just talking about whether that was the right thing to do or not, or whether you would get caught or not.

9:18But again, what kind of person do you become? What kind of habit are you building? And this matters too. Maybe karma exists. Maybe you will go to hell for it. But is it creating a kind of hell here, making you a hellish person, right? Are you actually getting away with it? Are you paying for it in another way? That's the question I want to leave you with today. That's, to me, the Stoic argument. You know, that's what so struck me about the Stoics earlier is they're making a pretty self-interested case, a pretty logical case for these things because they saw it up close and personal. They know what happens when you go down that road.

9:58the choice of Hercules that I built the Four Virtues series around. Seems like the road of vice is more fun than the road of virtue, but in the end, it isn't.

10:12Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com slash email.

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