Be Brave Enough To Do This

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1:04Welcome 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 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoic.com.

1:30Be 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, and also feels totally pointless and beneath someone as great as Seneca or Mark Cerelius. 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.

2:12But 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 Hierocles, 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, Hierocles 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?

2:50What 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'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 Stoic Leadership Challenge.

3:28Not only that leaders are leaders regardless of their gender or 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.

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