You’ll Be Called Worse…By Better

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

1:09but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence. My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since.

1:48On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It Over the Holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr. Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events. You'll be called worse by better. Marcus Aurelius was the public face of an empire. Seneca published books and plays.

2:33Cato and Cicero ran for office. Epictetus was a slave to a powerful Roman at his whim and mercy. In other words, they knew what it was like to be criticized. They knew what it was like to be received warmly by the audience, and not so warmly. They were subject to withering abuse talked about as if they were not standing right there or as if they didn't have normal human feelings. But of course they did. But what Stoicism was there to do was to help them endure the pains and blows of feedback and critique and attack. If only they really knew me, Epictetus once joked, they'd say even worse things.

3:15This was his way of making light of the cruel things that he would have often heard by his abusive owner. We care about ourselves more than other people, Marcus Aurelius writes with bafflement in Meditations. but care about other people's opinions more than our own. In another passage, he reminds himself to consider the character and the habits of the person attacking him, thinking about what they were doing in private just a few minutes ago. These public-facing stoics would have loved the response of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau when he was told that Richard Nixon had called him an asshole.

3:53I have been called worse things by better people. He would later write, Being criticized is part of the job. So is being misunderstood. Being abused isn't fair, but no one gets out of life without experiencing their share of it. We have to be ready for it, and ready to put it in its proper context. We have to be ready to shrug it off and count ourselves as lucky that it wasn't worse. Because it always can be.

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