The Wealthiest Person is a Pauper | Practice Gentleness Instead of Anger

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: The wealthiest person is a pauper. We think they have it all, and in a way they do. They have money, they have power, they have a private jet and an enormous amount of access. Look at Marcus Rius. Look at what he commanded. Look at Seneca or Cicero or Cato, their estates, their natural talents, their influence. Look at plenty of other wealthy Romans or ancients who had even more. And yet what we miss is that they, for all of this, were still fundamentally constrained. They were limited in all the ways that human beings are limited. No control of the weather, fundamentally mortal, etc. They were also impoverished, as all humans are.

0:52Not enough time, never fully satisfied. And we've been talking about that great song, A Satisfied Mind, recently, and it's haunting line. The wealthiest person is a pauper. And how especially poor many rich people are when it comes to relationships, to contentment, to peace. And we are not exceptions to this, whatever our net worth happens to be. and worse, we all make ourselves poorer than we need to be in our craving for more and our ignoring of what actually matters in life and the way we waste our time or in the delusions we hold. We seem to think that there is some kind of escape velocity when it comes to money, that if we can just get to a certain amount, we will be beyond this.

1:34But how much more evidence do you need that this is simply not true? The Stoics understood that the wealthiest person can still be a pauper, poor in peace, poor in contentment, poor in perspective.

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4:39Ryan Holiday: Practice gentleness instead of anger. It's easy to imagine Marcus Aurelius losing his temper. His responsibilities were vast and his job required him to work with many frustrating, difficult people. As such, he had an acute sense of the problem of anger, knowing just how counterproductive it can be and how miserable it can make its users. He often repeated a simple exercise designed to preserve goodwill for others by simply replacing anger with gentleness. We can't allow ourselves to desert our goodwill, and we must remind ourselves that no one makes mistakes willingly. Each time you feel anger this week, remember Marcus, see how you might replace it with gentleness and write some examples down.

5:20Ryan Holiday: This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing on Reflection in the Art of Living. And every day I do the little prompt, and we have some quotes here from Marcus. As you move forward along the path of reason, people will stand in your way. They will never be able to keep you from doing what's sound, so don't let them knock out your goodwill. Keep a steady watch on both fronts, not only for well-based judgments and actions, but also for gentleness with those who would obstruct our path or create difficulties. for getting angry is a weakness just as much as abandoning the task or surrendering to panic that's marcus aurelius's meditations 11 9 then in meditations 763 he quotes plato as plato said every soul is deprived of truth against its will the same holds true for justice self-control and goodwill to others every similar virtue it's essential to constantly keep this in your mind for it will make you more gentle for all.

6:20Ryan Holiday: And finally, Meditations 1118, he says, Keep this thought handy when you feel a fit of rage coming on. It's not manly to be enraged. Rather, gentleness and civility are more human and therefore manlier. A real man doesn't give way to anger or discontent. Such a person has strength, courage, and endurance. So let's put aside these sort of gender preconceptions, because the Stoics are obviously from a long, long time ago, But I think he's saying it's not impressive to lose your temper, to be aggressive, to be mean, to be domineering, to destroy or dunk or own on someone. He's saying that the most impressive thing is to keep under the body, as the Bible says, to keep in self-control, to not lose your temper.

7:05Ryan Holiday: Because to lose your temper is almost invariably to make the situation worse. Not only is it impotent and pointless and never solves the problem, but it usually makes things worse. That's another thing Marcus says. You know, he says how much worse the consequences of anger are than the things that caused it. And I've said this before, but like, I've never lost my temper and then felt so glad that I did that. Actually, just yesterday, I was going back and forth with this person that we hired to do something, a very expensive person. And they'd been like jerking us around for months. and you know i i finally laid out in very clear simple language this is what i want this is what has to happen stop wasting our time and then three seconds later they responded like well actually blah blah blah blah let's get on the phone and discuss and i've said this before but i hate getting on the phone especially with things that don't need to be gotten on the phone about you know there's part of me that wanted to write this really angry email and instead instead of doing that instead of calling this person and yelling at them i called someone i work with and i said look, I'm calling you instead of yelling at this person.

8:12Ryan Holiday: Here's where I am. Here's what I want. It's obvious that I'm upset. This person knows I'm upset. Why don't you call them and just work out a solution so we never have to talk about this again, right? Just make this go away, solve it. I don't need to get the last word here. I just want this to go away. And that's how I try to solve things that are upsetting to me. And I try to have some self-awareness of like, I know what I'm going to do is this. And then what they're going to do is this. And then I'm going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I will be unhappy. And this person probably won't feel any of it because if they were aware of what's happening, we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.

8:52Ryan Holiday: So that's how I try to think about it. You want to catch yourself before you go through it. You want to use it as an opportunity for the next level. I'm not quite there, as Marcus is saying, is try to respond with gentleness. Where is this person coming from? And that's actually something that I talked about with my partner. We were like, there's got to be something going on with this person because it doesn't make any sense. This is ridiculous. And I suspect that is maybe they're going through a divorce. Maybe their kid is sick. Maybe their business is falling apart. Just you don't know what people are going through.

9:23Ryan Holiday: So to scream at them and yell at them, not only is it probably not going to solve anything, but they're probably overwhelmed already. And that's why you're in this mess. So take a minute. remember it's more impressive to be controlled you don't have to get the last word you don't have to get angry solve the problem move on practice gentleness instead of anger

9:47Ryan Holiday: hey 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.

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