Have You Lost The Beat, Tune, or Rhythm? | Think About It From The Other Person's Perspective

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: Have you lost the beat, tune, or rhythm? Here's a great passage from the Gregory Hayes Translation of Meditations. When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, he writes, Revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you can keep going back to it. In his great annotated edition of Meditations, Robin Waterfield translated the same passage like this. When the pressure of circumstances somewhat disturbs your peace of mind, recover quickly and don't lose your rhythm for longer than necessary. In any case, you'll master the measure all the better by constantly returning to it.

0:54Ryan Holiday: And here's the same passage in George William Crystal's 1902 translation. Whenever your situation forces trouble upon you, return quickly to yourself and interrupt the rhythm of life no longer than you are compelled. Your grasp of harmony will grow sure by the continual recurrence to it. Maxwell Stanworth's 1964 translation. When force of circumstances upsets your equanimity, lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual reoccurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it. And for the Daily Stoic, Steve Hanselman and I translated it like this.

1:35Ryan Holiday: When forced, as it seems, by circumstances into utter confusion, get hold of yourself quickly. Don't be locked out of the rhythm any longer than necessary. You'll be able to keep the beat if you are constantly returning to it. Five different translators, five different ways of seeing it. And yet the core message rings through in every version. You will get knocked off course. You will lapse on a resolution. You will fall off the wagon. You will get out of sorts. That's unavoidable. What matters is how quickly you return, how fast you find the rhythm again. And it's worth thinking about this passage right now because this is exactly the time of year when most of us are feeling like we've lost the rhythm.

2:19Ryan Holiday: Think about where you were in January. The slate was clean. You had goals. You had intentions. You had energy. You were going to read more, eat better, get organized, be more present. But then life happened. The clutter crept back in. The calendar filled up. The inbox overflowed. The habits you meant to build quietly fell away, replaced by ones you meant to break. The things you were putting off kept getting put off. And the messes, physical, digital, and emotional, piled up. And now here we are, already a couple of months into 2026, and if you're honest with yourself, you're more cluttered than you like.

2:57Ryan Holiday: A little more scattered, a little more stressed. But Marcus Aurelius would tell you that that's fine, that's life. The important thing is, will you get back on track? will you return to the rhythm? That's what spring is for, cleaning things up, paring things down, getting back to the rhythm. And that's what the 2026 Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge is for. It's 10 days of stoic-inspired challenges tended to help you clean up, reset your life, and refocus on what matters. Every morning for 10 days, you're going to get one inspired stoic challenge to kick off the day. Something you can put to use in your life right now to tackle that clutter to get back on track.

3:42Ryan Holiday: Whether you've got those doom boxes that are piling up, right, that you know you need to deal with, whether you're inundated with digital distractions, whether you've overloaded on commitment to inessential things, you've got some mental or emotional baggage that you need desperately to put down. Well, that's what we're going to work on in the daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge. You can join me and thousands of other Stoics by signing up right now. And by the way, we have a special discount for podcast listeners. This year, we're offering 20 % off when you use code DSPOD20 at checkout. You can join me and thousands of other Stoics in the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge.

4:19Ryan Holiday: Just head over to dailystoic.com slash spring and enter code DSPOD20 to get 20 % off. By the way, if you join Daily Stoic Life, you get this challenge and all the challenges as part of that for free. So you can do that at dailystoiclife.com.

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7:09Think about it 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 flipped this habit around, reminding themselves to be suspicious of their own first reaction and approach others first with sympathy. Powerful 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 always to take a moment to remember his own failings. and to contemplate how another might see the situation.

7:52He reminded himself, as we should, that most people are trying their best, even though that's easy to lose sight of in the rough and tumble of daily life. Let's remember that today and think about each interaction from more than just our own point of view. That's the Daily Stoic Journal weekly entry. And we've got some quotes from Marcus Aurelius here. He says, whenever someone has done wrong by you,

8:47And then he says, when your sparring partner scratches or headbutts you, you don't then make a show of it or protest or view him with suspicion or as 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. You know, I tell the story, and stillness is the key. I open part one, the perception part of the book, the story of Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

9:26Kennedy and Khrushchev face off over some nuclear ballistic missiles placed on the island of Cuba. And what's so remarkable about this moment, why I look at Kennedy and why I think he embodies what Marcus Aurelius is talking about in both senses, both in the why did they do this? What are they trying to do? And also, you know, people are not great. They're going to try to cheat or pull one over on you, but you can't let that break you or make you bitter. You've got to be cognizant and aware of it. Kennedy thinks not just what he's going to do, but he's conscious enough to think, what is Khrushchev going to do?

10:03What is Khrushchev trying to do with this? And in fact, Khrushchev's real fatal calculation is that he doesn't have a good read on Kennedy. He'd sort of bullied Kennedy at a conference, had seen Kennedy bungle the Bay of Pigs. He thought he knew Kennedy and he thought he knew America, but he didn't. He couldn't conceive of how America would react to these missiles right on that island. And Kennedy, though, realizes, especially when his military advisors are telling him, you've got to bomb Cuba, you've got to bomb the shit out of Cuba, it's going to be, you know, we've got to go in to avoid World War III.

10:38Kennedy knows that to do that, he thinks about Khrushchev, how they're in the same position. They're both leading these sort of loose coalitions and with divergent interests and are human beings, but also heads of state. He's really able to think about Khrushchev's position. And he says, look, I'm not worried even about what Khrushchev's going to do in response to what I'm going to do. I'm worried about like step six or seven in this chain of escalation. And so we think about things from people's perspective, not just because empathy is good, not just because justice is important, but strategically it's essential, right?

11:17When I was in public relations, you would see people get so consumed with the truth of what they had to say or their own experience or their own point of view. They couldn't concede that the reporter has their own interests, that the public has their own interests and position to effectively navigate the world, to be successful. You've got to understand other people's perspective. You've got to think about what's going on with them. And this allows you to not only be more patient, more forgiving, and more gracious, as Marcus says, but it also allows you to be more effective and successful at whatever it is that you are doing.

11:50So I urge you today to spend some time practicing, let's call it, strategic empathy. It will make you better. But most importantly, as we saw in the Kennedy and Cuban Missile Crisis example, it may well save the world. It makes the world a better place if we are more empathetic with each other. As Seneca said, we're all wicked people in a wicked world. If we can understand this, we can be kind and patient and tolerant and understanding. We will all get more of what we want and need.

12:21Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word, tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

13:00Thank you.