How To Not Be Afraid of Criticism | Marcus Aurelius' Advice For Better Days

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1:29Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these Stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy.

1:56How Not to Be Afraid of Criticism No one likes to be found at fault. In fact, this is what many of us walk around fearing, that we'll be exposed as imposters, that we'll be put on the spot in front of people, that we'll have to admit error. This makes us defensive, it makes us play it safe, and in some cases, it even makes us dishonest. It's a cure, you could say, that's worse than the disease. Gandhi, once being interviewed by a reporter, dispensed with all that. I am very imperfect, he said. Before you are gone, you will have discovered a hundred of my faults, and if you don't, I will help you see them.

2:29Why would he do such a thing? Perhaps it was because he knew that as a leader, egotism and an outsized sense of one's abilities was dangerous and destructive. Perhaps he was inoculating himself against the fear in advance, taking away the power of the reporter to control Gandhi's fate by disclosing upfront what might have otherwise be investigated or even misconstrued. There is a line from Epictetus who, after being criticized, joked, yes, but he doesn't even know the half of it because he could have said more. It's not that Epictetus had a bunch of bodies buried somewhere, it's that he had also inoculated himself against criticism by being more aware of his flaws and more concerned about addressing them than even his enemies.

3:12Why should we be afraid of criticism? As Marcus Aurelius writes, if the criticism is correct and we are in error, then the person criticizing us has done a favor by correcting it. If they are wrong, what do we care? More likely, if we are doing our job right, we should be already well aware of the issue that people are raising and already be fixing it. And we should have no sense of ourselves as perfect or above critique, nor should we be so fragile and vulnerable as to not be able to bear being disliked or disagreed with.

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4:48At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, I have to go to work. As a human being, what do I have to complain of if I'm going to do what I was born for? The things I was brought into this world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? But it's nicer here. So you were born to feel nice instead of doing things and experiencing them? Do you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can? And you're not willing to do your job as a human being?

5:31Why aren't you running to do what your nature demands? But we have to sleep sometime. Agreed. But nature set a limit on that, as it did on eating and drinking. And you're over the limit. You've had more than enough of that, but not of working. There, you're still below your quota. You don't love yourself enough, or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it. They even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving? The dancer for the dance. When they're really possessed by what they do, they'd rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

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