Everybody Is Doing Their Job | Think About It From The Other Person's Perspective

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0:54I'm picking my kids up from school today and then doing our weekly routine, which is I take them over to Whole Foods. and we get all our groceries for the week. Then we have dinner. It's one of their favorite things to do. It's one of my favorite things to do. And then my wife loves it because she doesn't have to take care of it. This holiday season, whether you're a guest or hosting the big dinner Whole Foods Market has what you need to delight everyone at your table. They even have heat and eat sides from the prepared foods department. You can make Whole Foods your one-stop shop. Everything follows Whole Foods Market's strict ingredients standards so you know it'll be delicious and good for you.

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1:40Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do. And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoic intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about, whatever it is you happen to be doing. So let's get into it.

2:17Everybody is doing their job. That obnoxious person, that contractor who ripped you off, that slow driver, the overly enthusiastic exercise instructor, that brusque receptionist, that clingy parent, that friend holding a grudge, the loud neighbor. They're not exactly your favorite. They don't exactly make your life easier. But you know what you need to remember? You need to remember that they are just doing their jobs. Is a world without shameless people possible? Mark Surrealis asks in meditations. No, it isn't, he reminds himself. So why am I surprised to find one, he says. Somebody has to be that person, and this is that person.

2:54In her wonderful book on parenting, Good Inside, Dr. Becky Kennedy discusses what to do when a young child is having a full-on meltdown, what to do when they're hitting a sibling because they're upset or frustrated. Of course, your job is to keep them safe, to intervene. But as that's happening, she says we ought to say to ourselves, my child is just doing their job of expressing feelings. We're both doing what we need to do. I can handle this. That's what Marcus Reles tried to do when he encountered jerks and liars and cheats. That's what you have to do with the people that you encounter in your life.

3:27Your kids are kids. It's their job to freak out sometimes. It's their job to be kids. At least they're having fun with it. That overbearing police officer, somebody had to be a bad cop and they're it. Sucks for everyone, but definitely for them. Somebody has to be the slow driver, that neighbor that gets on everyone's nerves, the whatever. This is their assignment. But our assignment? Like the parent lovingly calming down that angry toddler, our job is to be patient and decent and calm and understanding. It's a hard job, but it's a good one. It's our job.

4:12Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

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5:52Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. We have this week's entry from the Daily Stoic Journal. I would notice that's it on the table. It's not too hard. I got the leather make time case on mine. I do this most nights before I go to bed, and today's entry is about thinking about things from the other person's perspective. We tend to assume the best about our own intentions and the worst about other people's. Then we wonder why life is so full of conflict. The Stoics flip this habit around, reminding themselves to be suspicious about their own first reaction and to approach others first with sympathy.

6:31Powerful people are often surprisingly terrible at behaving this way, but Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man on earth during his reign, was renowned for his humanity in dealing with others. He told himself to always take a moment to remember his own failings and to contemplate how another might see a situation. He reminded himself, as we all should, that most people are trying their best, even though it's easy to lose sight of this in the rough and tumble of daily life. Let's remember that this week as we think about each interaction with more than just our own point of view. Socrates line was that no one does wrong on purpose, right?

7:07It's not totally true. I guess he's missing sociopaths and psychopaths and stuff, but most people are not trying to be wrong. They might not be able to see that they're wrong, but they're trying to be right. And so we have two quotes from Marcus Aurelius in today's entry. This is Meditations 726, the first one. He says, whenever someone has done wrong by you, immediately consider what notion of good or evil they had in doing it. For when you see that, you'll feel compassion instead of astonishment or rage. For you may yourself have had the same notions of good and evil or similar ones, in which case you'll make an allowance for what they've done.

7:38But if you no longer hold the same notions, you'll be more readily gracious for their error. And then meditations 620. So he's thinking about this same thing pretty far apart from each other in meditations. He says, when your sparring partner scratches or headbutts you, you don't make a show of it or protest or view him with suspicion or his plotting against you. And yet you keep an eye on him, not as an enemy or with suspicion, but with a healthy avoidance. You should act this way with all things in life. We should give a pass to many things with our fellow trainees for, as I've said, it's possible to avoid without suspicion or hate.

8:16This idea of, you know, thinking about what they're thinking about. General H.R. McMaster, who I've had on the podcast, he talked about the idea of strategic empathy, right? That leaders, military leaders, especially have to think about what their opponent is thinking. I tell the story in the book Stillness is the Key about the Cuban Missile Crisis. And we think about Kennedy's ability to think about Khrushchev, even though Khrushchev was in the wrong, even though this was an untenable situation, even though it took the world to the precipice of nuclear war. As Kennedy is surrounded by these sort of rabid, aggressive advisors, you're telling them, you know, you got to do this aggressive thing, which was Bomb Cuba, he's able to step back and think for a second, oh, wait, this is what Khrushchev's advisors are thinking.

9:03He realizes that they're in the same position. He's able to actually see that Khrushchev is probably coming at this from a position of strategic weakness, that it was a desperate move. And so his ability to interpret it from that perspective, to see it from Khrushchev's point of view, allows him first not to make it worse. And then it's to give Khrushchev the ability to come to his senses. And Khrushchev does, he sends this long telegram. Khrushchev sort of starts to see it from Kennedy's perspective. He says, you know, we're tearing the knot of war and that it's getting tighter and tighter as we're both doing what we're doing.

9:39And so they're able to come together and come to a solution. Now, it doesn't always work this way. And just because you can articulate or wrap your head around someone's grievance or their motivations. It doesn't mean it's right. It doesn't mean that kind of goes, oh, this makes sense to the Russians why they would want missiles in Cuba. After all, we have a lot of our own missiles, right? No, but it does give him an off-ramp from his anger, gives him an off-ramp from his emotional reaction and allows him to think about the situation logically, strategically, and then come up with diplomatic solutions.

10:12And I think this works in life. How often do you actually understand what the other person is thinking? And then there's something that I've learned about in my reading, which I thought was a really interesting concept. It's called the general attribution fallacy. So you look at someone and they make this mistake. I just saw this today. Someone was reading some thread on Nextdoor, which I shouldn't have been doing. And someone clearly misread what the other person was saying and an excuse basically to bring up their not so smart and I would say repugnant political views. And I, I wanted to go, Oh, this person has those views.

10:52Those are stupid views. So that's why this person is being stupid. Right. But I've misread things. I was just thinking of a text thread the other day where I was, I totally misread what the person was saying. And I responded not like that, but I read something or I thought I read it, but I was reading it so fast I got the wrong meaning, right? I don't think I'm an idiot. I would be mad if that person berated me and made me feel stupid, right? Because with myself, I know that I'm complicated. I know that I sometimes make mistakes and these mistakes are not representative of me as a person. Now, the problem with the general attribution policy, what we do to other people is we go, oh, you made this mistake.

11:31It says something about who you are. And it gives me an excuse to write you off entirely, which it doesn't, right? So this is a really important stoic idea. We're talking about empathy here. We're talking about perspective. We're talking about perspective, talking about stepping back, seeing it from a different angle. We're not just looking at the what of what happened, but the why, what happened, the intention of what happened. So we can be more patient. We can be more understanding. We can also learn ourselves how not to do the same thing. And this is just a really important idea. And I hope you do some riffing on that in your journaling this week or when you're on a walk.

12:09And if you haven't checked out the Daily Stoic Journal, you can grab it anywhere books are sold. But if you want this cool leather cover, you can grab that at store.dailystoic.com. I like mine. It's got these little card holders for my note cards. It holds my pen in there. So I'm going out of town tomorrow. I'm going to bring it with me. And it's a reminder from Seneca that we must examine our day and go back over what we've done and said, hiding nothing from ourselves, passing nothing by. I think there's no better thing to do that about than what other people are doing and saying, get a little empathy out of it.

12:41So I'll leave you there and I'll talk to you soon.

12:47Thanks for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. Just a reminder, we've got signed copies of all my books in the Daily Stoic store. You can get them personalized. You can get them sent to a friend. The obstacle is the way you go is the enemy. Stillness is the key. The leather-bound edition of the Daily Stoic. We have them all in the Daily Stoic store, which you can check out at store.dailystoic.com. My family owns a 2023 Toyota 4Runner, and honestly, it's my favorite vehicle that I've ever owned. Around town, it's smooth and reliable, but where it really shines is on our trips into the backcountry.

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