This Is The Secret To Wisdom | with Judge Yourself, Not Others

0:00Ryan Holiday: So I just got back from two weeks in New Zealand and Australia. I was on tour for Daily Stoic Live. And we stayed in two different places in Bondi Beach. I would wake up every morning, go for a long run. And it's been one of my favorite places for like a decade and a half. Actually, it made me think while I was there that the very first time that my wife and I went to Australia, part of how we paid for that trip was we listed our house on Airbnb while we were gone. That was something we would do back then, especially as I was making that transition from marketing, my corporate career to writing, is that when I would travel for talks, we would list our house on Airbnb.

0:35Ryan Holiday: We had this little house in East Austin, and that's how we covered the mortgages. When we were gone, people would stay in it while we were out of town. If you have space and you're going to be away, maybe that can be a memorable place for someone else to stay. Your home might be worth more than you think. And you can find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This is the secret to wisdom. Just one thing every day. That's it. Seneca said the path to wisdom was best traveled by acquiring one thing each day.

1:22Ryan Holiday: Something that fortifies you against adversity, poverty, death, or whatever else life might throw at you. Now, you might assume that Seneca is talking about some physical or spiritual object of tremendous gravity, some extensive or groundbreaking lesson. But we can see from his letters to Lucilius that he was talking about something much smaller, much easier to obtain. He was talking about quotes. One quote a day, he was saying and sharing with his friend. That's all we need to get better and wiser and stronger and more resilient. It's a bit of advice, a practice that has persisted through the centuries.

2:04Ryan Holiday: Instagram posts and inspirational posters, tattoos and the like. And here we are in the 21st century. You're listening to this podcast or opening the Daily Stoic email. It's also why we made the Daily Stoic quote-a-day calendar, which we've just revised and redesigned. We've added in all the quotes from the 10th anniversary of the Daily Stoic, because we want you to stop thinking of wisdom as something you get via epiphany or even from a couple of years of intense study, or that you can only get by trial and error, painful experience. No, something you accumulate day by day, action by action, as Marcus Aurelius put it, you know, something you get over the course of a lifetime.

2:54Ryan Holiday: One page, 365 days. You could sit on your desk, your nightstand. I have it on a little file cabinet near my desk where I write. Put it on your kitchen counter or wherever you could use some Stoic wisdom in your life. And you can grab it now in the Daily Stoic store. We usually sell out of them. So I'm excited. You can grab one and give it as a great gift. Just make sure you order it before December 16th to get it in time for the holidays. I'll link to that in today's show notes, or just go to dailystoic.com slash calendar.

3:39Ryan Holiday: Judge yourself, not others. There is nothing less philosophical than being a know-it-all. This is especially true of those who use their knowledge to scold others for their mistakes while claiming the superiority of their knowledge or insight. The Stoics taught that behaving this way was to miss the entire purpose of philosophy, as a tool for self-correction, medicine for our own souls, not a weapon for putting down others. Seneca's letters twice employ the metaphor of scrubbing down or scraping off our faults. We need to see ourselves as in the care of philosophy's principles, he says, or as Epictetus put it later, when referring to the philosopher's lecture hall, we need to see it as a hospital for our own therapy.

4:24Ryan Holiday: So try not to write down a single complaint or problem of another person in your journal this week, focus on what ails you. We have two quotes from Seneca's moral letters and one from the discourses. When philosophy is wielded with arrogance and stubbornly, it is the cause for the ruin of many. Let philosophy scrape off your own faults rather than be a way to rail against the faults of others. That's Seneca letter 103. Some people with exceptional minds quickly grasp virtue or produce it within themselves, but other dim and lazy types hindered by bad habits must have their rusty souls constantly scrubbed down.

5:01Ryan Holiday: The weaker sorts will be helped and lifted from their bad opinions if we put them in the care of philosophy's principles. That's Epictetus's Moral Letters 95. And then Epictetus's Discourse is 323. Men, the philosopher's lecture hall is a hospital. You shouldn't walk out of it feeling pleasure but pain, for you weren't well when you entered it. I think this is a tension here, and I've seen it. Some people maybe get it wrong, probably in bad faith when they reply to stuff I've posted or written. Who are you to criticize? I don't know. Who are you to say that have this political opinion or to say that this is right or wrong?

5:40Ryan Holiday: You're not perfect. Of course. Right. Of course, I'm not perfect. of course a stoic is primarily focused on their own edification their own improvement they're trying to look in the mirror they're trying to scrub off their own faults that doesn't mean that we turn a blind eye to what's happening in the world that doesn't mean we indulge and accept and encourage ridiculousness or injustices by other people i mean some of the best stoic lines are quips or criticisms of other people, right? The Stoics were also teachers. Zeno, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, they were writers and thinkers. They were responsible for teaching philosophy to people.

6:21Ryan Holiday: Of course, we have to make judgments. I think what the Stoics are really talking about is not being a Monday morning quarterback at the expense of your performance on Sunday, right? When I study history, obviously part of my job is to make judgments and communicate these ideas to you and to people and to myself. And that really is what I'm doing. And I have a chapter in Courage's Calling about why we don't judge another person's courage, right? We don't fully understand everything that's going on with them. But in another sense, we do judge their courage. But instead of criticizing them, instead of feeling better than them because they made this mistake.

7:00Ryan Holiday: We try to look at them as cautionary tales, almost like we would in a Greek tragedy or a Roman play, a Shakespearean play, and try to apply those lessons to our own lives. So the point is when you see someone else doing something wrong, when you see something you don't like, when you see someone debasing themselves, when you see someone advocating a preposterous or dangerous opinion, you can criticize it. You can call it out for what it is, but don't feel superior for it. Try to learn from it. Try to apply lessons from that to your own life. That's the journey that we're on here. Obviously, as a writer and a speaker, I have to draw on examples.

7:37Ryan Holiday: My work would be not very compelling if I didn't do that. So I have to walk a slightly different razor's edge. And I mean, look, that's what's so funny, right? The Stoics are saying, don't criticize other people. And yet, even in this quote from Seneca, Moral Letters 95, he's saying, look, some people get this naturally, but there are other dim and lazy types hindered by bad habits, and they must have their rusty souls constantly scrubbed. So that does exist, right? And somebody has to do that job. And perhaps that's your job with a friend or a family member. Just remember that your real job is scrubbing down your own rusty soul.

8:15Ryan Holiday: And if you ever think that it is not rusty, well, that is a compelling sign right there that it is. Just a funny note, I get this all the time because of ego is the enemy. People go, what do I do about my boss's ego? What do you do about all the egos in our organization? Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. But much less often do I get the question, I have an ego. What do I do about my ego, right? The question we often are gravitating towards solving other people's issues, focusing on other people's flaws. But as they say in the Bible, don't worry about the splinter in your neighbor's eye when you have a log in your own.

8:54Ryan Holiday: So that's what philosophy is about. You are not well, treat yourself first. But of course, you may recognize similar symptoms in other people if you need to point them out. Go right ahead.

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