No, This Is The Mission | Kindness Is Always The Right Response

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: Hey, it's Ryan. Hope you are well. I am just working on my talk. I'm going to be giving a talk in San Francisco and Portland in mid-June. I'd love to see you there. You can grab tickets at dailystoiclive.com. If you're not on the West Coast, you want to see me in the Midwest or on the East Coast. Tickets are up Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Boston, D.C. I'm forgetting another one. And then I'm going to be in Australia in October as well. All those tickets at dailystoiclive.com.

0:48Ryan Holiday: No, this is the mission. You thought you were supposed to be doing this. You thought your job was to do that. You were on a mission to do something very specific. But then what happened? Life happened. Stuff happened. Other people happened. And now, now that is the mission. When Marcus Aurelius wrote his famous passage about how the obstacle is the way, this is what he was referring to. There can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions, he said, because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes, the obstacle, to our acting. Nothing can prevent our mission, he was saying, because the mission adapts.

1:26Ryan Holiday: We thought our assignment was one thing, but now we realize it's another. Might be less fun. It might require more patience than we plan, more forgiveness than we possessed, demand more creativity than anticipated. But that's the point. We are growing and changing and expanding to meet this new mission. The obstacle isn't a detour. It is the path. It's crazy to me. Last year was the 10-year anniversary of The Obstacle is Away, and now it's the 11th year anniversary of it. I just, it's not anything I could have imagined without that book. I don't know. My life would be very different. Certainly, we wouldn't be here talking.

2:04Ryan Holiday: If you haven't read The Obstacle is the Way yet, you can check it out. We have a 10-year anniversary edition. I'll sign your copy. We've got leather-bound editions in the Daily Stoic store as well. I'll link to all that in today's show notes.

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4:49Kindness is always the right response. This is the May 12th entry from The Daily Stoic. Kindness is invincible, only when it's sincere, with no hypocrisy or faking. For what even can the most malicious person do if you keep showing kindness? And if given the chance, you gently point out where they went wrong. Right? As they were trying to harm you. This is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations 1118. What if the next time you were treated poorly, you didn't just restrain yourself from fighting back? What if you responded with unmitigated, sincere kindness? What if you could, as the Bible says, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you?

5:32What kind of effect do you think that would have? The Bible says that when you can do something nice and caring to a hateful enemy, it is like heaping burning coals on their head. The expected reaction to hatred is more hatred. When someone says something pointed or mean today, they're expecting you to respond in kind, not with kindness. And when that doesn't happen, they're embarrassed. It's a shock to their system. It makes them and you better. So rudeness, meanness, cruelty, these are a mask for deep-seated weakness. And kindness in these situations is only possible for people of great strength.

6:12You have that strength. Use it. I read a book by James Peck, who was one of the Freedom Riders. In fact, the book is called Freedom Rides, but it's his memoir. James Peck was one of the few white Freedom Riders, one of the early white participants in passive resistance to the horrendous injustice. that was segregation and Jim Crow in the American South. And in the book, he talks a handful of times about when he's being beaten, he's attacked, all these different occasions, and how in the middle of being beaten or bullied or attacked or whatever, he would often say something to the person attacking him.

6:50He'd ask them a question, or he wouldn't respond to an insult. He'd say something nice. And how often this was a record scratch moment. In some cases, it would shake the person out of their sort of spiral of rage and hatred because they just expected to get nastiness back. And when they didn't, it didn't always work, of course, but it was like, whoa, what am I doing? Who is it? It kind of reminded them, oh, this is a human being I'm about to do this to, not this abstraction that I've projected all this stuff to. nonviolence of course is the highest expression of this sort of biblical wisdom the christ-like suggestion of turning the other cheek it's extraordinarily difficult to do the people in civil rights movement they didn't just hear about this once and then magically become these saints there was real training one of the amazing stories martin luther king is attacked on stage as he's speaking to a large leadership conference in the civil rights movement and he's being beaten by this Nazi, a literal member of the American Nazi party.

7:51And the crowd watches like, is he going to fight back? Is he going to lift his hands to protect themselves? And they note the incredible discipline in which Martin Luther King drops his hands, like actually makes himself less defended. Again, that was a lifetime of training and meditation and planning and experience that gets him. They're not unlike the training that a special forces operator would have, you know, under fire. And then when the person is apprehended, Martin Luther King insists that he not be hurt. He takes him to a back room, not to beat the crap out of him, not to neutralize this threat, which Malcolm X would say he ought to have done, but he has a pleasant conversation with him.

8:31And again, that's a record scratch, the amount of discipline that that takes. I'm not asking that of you because I'm not sure I could give it myself. But Seneca's point that, look, everyone we meet is an opportunity for kindness. But to see these moments when we're provoked, when we're attacked, when we are treated unfairly, when we are abused, that makes the kindness all the greater, all the more impressive. And I want you to see that not as a weakness, but as a part of those disciplines of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. Martin Luther King realizes that, you know, Blacks and believers in racial equality in the United States were hopelessly outnumbered, that the forces of segregation in many cases had control of the police and the military, and that it was insane to try to fight that violence with violence.

9:23So he decided to treat it instead with kindness, with grace, with forgiveness, with discipline. And in the end, it was the only thing that made a difference. I'm not perfect at this. I respond to provocations and insults and attacks. It's never really to my benefit. I almost always regret it. It's not the kind thing to do. It's easy to have a comeback. It's easy to dunk on the idiot who's attacking you. It's therapeutic and cathartic even, but it doesn't help us move forward. It's not a great look. It certainly doesn't change their mind. So let's focus today on meeting everyone and everything with kindness, especially, particularly unkindness.

10:08Let's meet that kindness with unkindness, see what kind of difference it makes. Let's see who it stops short and whose attention it catches.