Don’t Let Them Make You Bitter Or Mean

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3:58Welcome 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 dailysteel.com.

4:24Whatever you decide to do with your life, whatever path you decide to walk, people are going to stand in your way. They're going to doubt you. They're going to give you bad advice. They will do you wrong on purpose and unintentionally. unintentionally. They'll lie. They'll undermine you. They may well actively take steps to stop you. Think about what it means to have a disruptive idea or business, something that promises to upend entire ways of thinking or doing things. It means you're not just someone's competition. You're an existential threat. Why would anyone faced with obsolescence, then irrelevance, then oblivion, just accept that fate?

5:00Of course, they're going to put up roadblocks. Of course, they're going to resist. And of course, there is going to be conflict. The important question is not if this is going to happen, at least according to the Stoics. It's about how you're going to respond to the challenge when it does. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, our opponents are going to gouge us in the ring. They're going to bruise us and butt us with their heads. The question is how we're going to react. Are we going to get angry and take it personally? Or are we going to keep our cool, take note of their tactics and change our strategy so this cheating doesn't prevent us from winning or catch us off guard.

5:38The other critical part to dealing with an adversarial situation, at least according to Seneca, is how we'll behave once we're on top. Are we going to hold grudges? Are we going to nurse anger about how we were treated by those entrenched interests or hang on to the resentment of powerful people that we felt when we were not powerful? Not if we want to be happy we won't, not if we want to be a better kind of leader when it's our turn. It is not to your benefit to see and hear everything, Seneca writes. Many injuries ought to pass over us. If you ignore them, you get no more injury from them. And not surprisingly, one of his most powerful essays is about clemency, the power of forgiveness of kindness, even to people who have not been kind to you.

6:22And his point was that you must do what is right regardless of the obstacles and the injuries. Don't let people make you bitter or angry or mean. It should not surprise any of us that people will protect the status quo if it's better for their own position, nor should it stop us. Just keep going. Love it all. Forget what doesn't matter. Ignore the wrongs and the slights. ignore the cuts and the bruises. We're the strongest one. We can absorb it and use it and learn from it. The strongest man, the great Nobel peace-winning poet Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote, is the one who forgets the most. Let that inspire you today.

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