The Daily Stoic - If Only They Really Knew…
Episode Date: May 22, 2024✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to rem...ember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient
wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom in everyday life.
Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some
of history's greatest men and women.
For more, you can visit us at dailysteelit.com.
If only they really knew. Not everyone is going to like you, as we've talked about. There is no one, not even Marcus Aurelius, who was universally beloved during their lifetime or afterwards.
It can be hard to accept this, but it's harder still sometimes
the reasons that they dislike you.
People judge us for where we come from,
for what we look like, for our age, for our religion.
They dislike us for the work we do.
They dislike us for what they heard
about the work that we do.
They dislike us for real, legitimate reasons,
mistakes we've made, stands we've taken,
and totally made up stuff.
They project their own insecurities, their own issues onto us.
They'll stick us with the consequences of their ignorance, their own poor comprehension
skills, their own bad taste.
Have you ever watched, as Kipling said, the truths you've spoken get twisted by knaves
to make a trap for fools?
It's a maddening, saddening thing.
Epictetus, though, says that we should take
all this with a smile. In fact, he joked that when we find ourselves criticized or disliked
by some stranger, instead of trying to convert them or argue with them, we should just say to
ourselves, if only they really knew me, they'd like me even less. That people dislike us for
their made-up, ridiculous reasons shouldn't bother us.
Superficial baseless criticism is not what we need to concern ourselves with.
Instead, let us focus on what we know we can improve on, where we are not meeting our own standards.
And if there is any external feedback we take, any approval we seek, let it come from the people who know us well, who we admire.
Epictetus would have taken it seriously if Mussonius Rufus was upset with him,
just like Marcus Aurelius would have
never wanted to let Antoninus down.
Everything else we can ignore.
["The Last Supper"] you