The Daily Stoic - It’ll Take Some Time | The Stoic Art Of Not Caring What People Think

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

In 1922, while an unpublished, struggling writer named Ernest Hemingway was covering events in Switzerland, his wife Hadley came from Paris to see him. Assuming he would want them, she packed up the writings Hemingway had accumulated in their apartment–manuscripts, short stories, poetry, and an unfinished novel, it was his life’s work. Hemingway had made some important literary contacts on his trip and she was sure he’d want to show off his work.-And in today's Daily Stoic video excerpt, Ryan outlines the Stoic strategies that you can use in your daily life to stop caring about what other people are thinking. Stoic knows they will be the recipient of unfair criticism. They don’t get distracted by it or make impotent threats. They certainly don’t take it personally either (In fact, Epictetus liked to joke that when someone unfairly criticizes you, feel grateful that they didn’t point out your real flaws). No, they didn’t do any of that. Because they knew that trying to control other people’s opinions was like trying to control the weather—and that a public life guarantees public scrutiny. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I told this story before, but the first Airbnb I stayed in was 15 years ago. I was looking for places to live when I wanted to be a writer and we stayed at this house, I think outside Phoenix. And then when I bought my first house here in Austin, I would rent it out when South by Southwest or F-1 or all these events. My wife and I would go out of town and we'd rent it and it helped pay for the mortgage and it supported me while I was a writer. You've probably had the same experience.

You stayed in an Airbnb and thought, this is doable. Maybe I could rent my place on Airbnb. And it's really that simple. You can start with a spare room or you can rent your whole place when you're away. You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. Maybe you set up a home office during the pandemic

and now you don't need it because you're back at work. Maybe you're traveling to see friends and family for the holidays. While your way, your home could be an Airbnb. Whether you could use extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca-host. Hey Canada, ever wish that managing your money could be a whole lot easier and way less stressful? That's why Coho is created. The financial app that's going to revolutionize

the way you handle your hard-earned cash and help you save even more. Coho is a company rooted in the belief that better financial solutions for all Canadians exist. Get cash back when you spend, multiply your money by earning interest and build your credit history. No hidden fees, no fine print, and no catch, just an app that's made for your money. Join over 1 million Canadians and sign up for your free trial now. Download the Coho app on Google or the app store today and visit koh.ca. That's coho.ca for more details. Daily Stoic listeners, you can get 20 bucks off when you make your first purchase of

$20 or more using the code DailyStoic20. Again, sign up for your free trial by downloading the Coho app and receive 20 bucks off when you make your first purchase of $20 or more using the code DailyStoic20. Welcome to the DailyStoic podcast where each day we read a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you in your everyday life. On Tuesdays, we take a closer look at these stoic ideas, how we can apply them in our actual lives. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy. It'll take some time. In 1922, while an unpublished struggling writer named Ernest Hemingway was covering events in Switzerland, his wife Hadley came from Paris to see him.

Assuming he would want them, she packed up the writings Hemingway had accumulated in their apartment, manuscripts, and short stories, and poetry, and an unfinished novel. Hemingway had made some important literary contacts on his trip, and she figured he intended to show off his work. As she waited during a stopover at a French train station, hadly stepped out for a drink and a newspaper, only to find on her return that the bag containing all of Hemingway's manuscripts had been stolen. It was an enormous, nearly unbearable loss. Years of hard work had disappeared in an instant, impossible to recover. Of course, you know the end of Hemingway's story, and can probably guess how this obstacle

contributed to it. Hemingway would go on to be one of the greatest writers of his generation. The loss of his back catalog forced him to start fresh, partly driving him to reinvent his literary style. The impediment to action advances action, Mark's Relays wrote, what stands in the way becomes the way it was precisely that. But, you know, wasn't that immediately? I suppose you heard of the loss of my juvenileia, Hemingway said, you naturally would say good, etc. But don't say it to me. I yet reached that mood. I worked three years on the damn stuff.

It is a certifiable fact that most of what we despair over and resist turns out to be good for us. We change because of it, respond to it. That's what stoicism is all about. Still, that doesn't change the heartbreak. It doesn't change the moment. It takes time. We have to be patient with ourselves,

with others in similar situations. Let our mood come around to it, let our perspective shift, let more information come in. We also have to make it good, as Hemway did. And that took time and effort and lots and lots of writing.

So it goes for you. You can't waste your time thinking about what other people are doing or saying. Mark's really says in Meditations. Unless of course it impacts the common good. You say, because when you're focused on what other people are thinking, other people are doing it. You're neglecting is what you're thinking, what you're doing, what's going on in here, which is the one thing that you actually have some control over. And this is a critical, stoic lesson. You focus on what we control, so we can make a difference there. what you're doing, what's going on in here, which is the one thing that you actually have some control over. And this is a critical, stoic lesson.

You focus on what we control, so we can make a difference there. One of the main things we don't control with the stoics talk about a lot is what other people think and say about us. I'm Ryan Holliday. I've not only written all these books about stoic philosophy. I've been lucky enough to talk about it, the NBA, and the NFL,

setting senators and special forces leaders. And it's key that we learn how to not care what other people say and think. We can imagine Mark Sures has this share of critics. He also has the people who's approval he craves. He says to himself, tranquility comes, when you stop caring what other people say and think and care only about what you do and say and think.

And in today's episode, we're gonna talk about the stoic art not caring what other people think. And in today's episode, we're going to talk about the stoic art, not caring for other people think. We don't compare ourselves to others because we don't control other people. The stoic say it's what's in your control versus what's outside of your control. What's inside your control is the work that you do, the situation that you're in. And when you start to say, oh, but that person has more than me. Or why do they situations that you're in and when you start to say, oh, but that person has more than me.

Or why do they have that? Now you're getting into envy and jealousy. You're stealing joy and happiness from yourself. Mark really says that happiness is about time yourself to what you do and say, not what other people do and say. I don't know if I have this word, euphemia, tunes tranquility. And Seneca says, well, what is that tranquility? How does one get it, right?

It's not you retreat to the mountains or a monastery or some beautiful resort. He says, euphemia in the course of life has to come from something else. He defines this euphemia as he says, a sense of the path that you're on without being distracted by the paths that crisscross yours, even from those, especially from those, or hopelessly lost. So you think about the interchanges and the connections. You think about all the other companies doing what you do going in similar directions. Think about what's happening in the industry in the world. It's very easy to get distracted, right? When I was in American Apparel,

I watched Doug destroy a billion dollar company because instead of doing what he did well, what the company was meant to do, started doing whatever 21 was doing, and Herman Alfitters was doing, and Agent M was doing, right? He lacked the discipline to stay on his path. He got distracted by the paths of those who crisscrossed him.

Even when some of those companies ultimately also were headed towards bankruptcy or having to reinvent themselves. So it takes a lot of discipline to know what you do, right? What makes you great, what your principles are, what your place in the market is, and to stay on that. And to not get distracted, right? To not get distracted by every shiny other thing. And so euphemia is not just a recipe

for personal happiness, tranquility, but it's also a recipe for success, right? Staying in your lane, staying on your tracks, doing what you set out to do. If you're into your strategic plan, your mission, your principles, this takes an enormous amount of discipline. Epic Titus said that we have to put every impression to the test. Your therapist might say, you have to ask yourself, is this assumption true? Right? Because the reality

is a lot of what we implicitly or instantly believe in, the situation is preposterous. Sometimes we're telling ourselves that people don't like us, but if we actually look at their behavior, they actually do like this. Or if we actually ask them, they would say that they do, right? We make these assumptions, and these assumptions, it turns out, are not really based on anything.

So if to put that impression up to the test, we have to ask ourselves, is this actually true? Why do I believe it? What evidence do I have for it? And this should help us from falling prey to false impressions, false beliefs, false assumptions. Let's go to what's true, not what our mind made up in a moment of weakness or doubt or confusion.

I moved to New Orleans more than 10 years ago. I lived in this little apartment building. And one of the things I did when I moved here was I didn't tell a single person that I was writing about. For two, still agrees. Number one, I found out afterwards that a bunch of my friends here thought that I just didn't have a job. They thought I was basically just a bum. They had no idea I was working on a book, which is an important still concept. Epic Titus says,

if you wish to improve, if you wish to become good at something, you must be content to be seen as stupid or foolish. I didn't care what anyone thought about me. I knew the work that I was doing. I knew that it would pay off eventually and when the announcement came out everyone was surprised. Oh Ryan was working on something. He wasn't just hanging out in his apartment. And then number two, a stoke doesn't talk about it. A stoke is about it. I've always believed that talking about what you're doing and doing it, fight for the same resources. So I didn't want to get credit for writing a book. I didn't want people to ask me about the

book. I didn't want validation for the book. I wanted to spend every day actually working on the project. That's what paid off. That's what put me on the track that I eventually got on. That's why I never talk about what I'm doing until after I've done it, you probably shouldn't either. In one of the greatest essays ever written, I think one of her most

dough pieces of writing, the novelist Joan Didian, is actually her table I'm sitting in the chair that was once in her house. She said that self-respect frees us from the expectations of others. She says it gives us back to ourselves and that that's the great singular power of self-respect. You realize that respect isn't something you get from other people. Respect comes from in here, right? And by respecting oneself, holding oneself to a certain standard, having a certain character, knowing one's worth and value,

what you will do, what you won't do, from this emanates a kind of confidence that makes one worthy of respect. The stoics of this great consubesctually in a play about Kato and his founding fathers were fond of it. They were saying nothing can guarantee you success, but there's something better still that's deserving it, being worthy of it. And I think that's the idea. Having respect of other people is great.

Obviously, Kato appreciated the fact that people saw him as Cato. But what mattered was that he was actually worthy of it, that he lived a life that he was a person worthy of that success. And that starts from how he saw himself, that starts from the character that he cultivated and the same is true for us. If good work comes from being present, it's preventing your ability from actually being

great on the television show that you're on. You're spending energy out in the world on stuff that doesn't matter, instead of being like, I'm going to be the best that I can be in the thing that I am. 100%. If you are constantly dwelling on other people's opinions, if you are constantly dwelling on other people's success, it will 100% diminish your capability of doing good work. Just know if it ends or buts about it because the mind has a certain amount of bandwidth. And the way I always express this when I talk to people about it, I go look at it like a number. If you had a hundred bandwidth, like if your bandwidth was 100 and then someone said something

mean to you on Twitter and you read that and responded and you go back and forth. Now how much do you have? I bet you got about 30 is gone. 30% is just dedicated to this thing. It might be 40. Now whatever work you are actually trying to do is greatly diminished because you don't have the focus. When you're find yourself being criticized by someone, Markz really says you have to get inside of them, look in their soul, look at what kind of person they are, he says.

And then you'll find you won't strain to impress them so much, right? It's like that line and fight club about how we spend all our time and energy trying to impress people who we don't even like, who we don't even respect. It's kind of insane, if you think about it. So when you think about the approval of the people that you are craving that you are chasing, you realize who they are, you realize what they actually value, you realize how wrong they are all the time. It discounts the amount of energy and focus you're going to spend on trying to make them like. His point was that we too often accept the disapproval of say a hater without actually seeing who this hater is.

What if they ever actually done, right? Do they have any real expertise here at all? Do they know what we're trying to do, right? They're judging us for a mistake that we made, for weakness that we have, but maybe their weaknesses are way worse, right? That's a very silly way to do it. So you have to look at this person who's approval you want.

You feel like you're no good because you didn't go to Harvard. Look at the people who have gone to Harvard, right? Look at the people who have not gone to Harvard. Is this actually say anything about you? Look at the problems, the mistakes that institution had made, and is it really that important for it to reflect on you.

I think you know, as the founder of Stoicism, he had this social anxiety. Someone said he had sort of stubby, had weird legs, kind of a weird appearance. And he had this mentor, this philosopher mentor named Cratees. And Cratees realized that Xeno was too self-conscious. He cared too much about what other people thought about him and he thought people were looking at him all the time.

So he sent, he asked him to carry this large cauldron of soup across town. And he knew that Xeno would be mortified at the idea. So he caught Xeno kind of like trying to sneak around, take it on these back roads, do it at night. So Cratee's was following them. And right as he was in front of some people, he hit the pot with his staff,

and it spilled the soup all over. Xeno, of course, Xeno is all embarrassed and he ran off. And he said, where are you going, my friend? Don't you realize nothing has happened to you? And his point was that no harm is actually the fallen. You just because some people are looking at you at you or none of these people know who you are. They don't care.

They're immediately gonna forget this event. So I think what the Stoics realizes that one, naturally we're self-conscious. So they're not denying that you care what other people think or how you're being seen, but they actively practiced not being ashamed by these things. Kato, for instance, would walk around bare headed, he would walk around bare footed, he wore ratty clothes,

even though he could afford the finest garments. And he did this because he was trying to make himself immune to try and notculate himself against caring about what other people think. And so I think the real benefit of that, if you look at Kato's life, is that towards the end, when everyone was so afraid of Julius Caesar,

when everyone was going along with what Julius Caesar wanted to do, Kato was the one who was comfortable standing alone. He was the comfortable being the odd man out. He was comfortable, you know, people being mad at him and saying, why can't you go along to get along? Why are you being like this? Why are you being such an asshole? He had the strength and the confidence to do the right thing when everyone else was afraid because he'd actively practiced not caring so much about what other people think. So look, I'm not saying

it's easy and I'm not saying I don't catch myself doing it too, but it's something you work on and you get better at. And so it's important to realize that stilicism that is a practice, it's a process, it's not just a bunch of ideas. It's something you engage in, the way that Kratis was for Zeno, and of course the way that Kato was in his philosophical practice as well. It's strange, we not only care about other people's opinions, we care about the opinions of people in the future who we will never meet, who will be dead before or ever walk this earth. Mark said, you know, people who long for posthumous fame, they forget not only are they not

going to be around to enjoy it. But the people in the future will be as just as dumb and silly and ridiculous and obsessed with fads and valuing the wrong things as people right now. So what matters is what you think. He says, we love ourselves more than other people, but we care about their opinion more than our own. It's insane. You know what's right.

You know what you value. You know what's important. You know what your principles are. That's what you have to measure yourself against. What you're capable of, what you're trying to do, external approval, external validation, external results, that's secondary. How many views this does? That's not important.

Did I say what I wanted to say? Did I do what I wanted to do? Did I bring my best self to it? That's what matters. It's one of the most frustrating things in the entire world. You do the right thing, you treat people well, you hold yourself to a certain high standards, and then what happened? People talk shit about you, people steal from you, people screw you over.

That's how it goes. Kipling says, can you bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by a nave to make a trap for fools. Mark Smith says, though, cut you with knives, they'll stab you in the back, they'll shower you with curses, they'll stab you in the back, they'll shower you with curses, they'll argue in bad faith. And then he says, but what does that cut your mind off from clearness, insanity, and self-control,

and justice? No. To the stokes, it doesn't matter what other people do. It doesn't matter if you're not recognized and rewarded for doing the right thing. You stay on the path that you know is true and good, you stay true and good anyway, because to betray it is to add insult

on top of injury. When someone criticizes me, I do this exercise for Marx to realize that. Just think about this person. Think about what they just submitted to, think about who they are, think about what they're addicted to, think about what they've ever accomplished.

And what you realize is that this person who's opinion, you are about to let supersede your own evaluation of yourself and your work. He's actually worse than meaningless. They're like the opposite of who you're trying to be. So it's good that they don't like what you're doing. You don't want their approval. Focus on what you think, focus on who you wanna be as he says, we love ourselves more than other people,

but then for some reason we care about other people's opinions more than our own. That's insanity. You gotta focus on who you are, on your own internal scorecard, on your sense of self. That's what you measure yourself against. Not the nonsense of other people, not the worthless opinions.

These people who quite frankly, you don't respect anyway. Yeah! Yeah! If you want more wisdom inspired from the St opinions, these people who quite have you at dailystoic.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hi, it's me, the Grand Puba of Bahambad, the OG Green Grump, the Grinch from Wondery. Tis the Grinch Holiday talk show is a pathetic attempt by the people of O'Vill to use my situation

as a teachable moment. So join me, the Grinch, along with Cindy Luhu. Hello, everyone. And of course, my dog Max. Every week for this complete waste of time. Listen, as I launch a campaign against Christmas cheer, grilling celebrity guests, like chestnuts on an open fire. They'll try to get my heart to grow a few sizes, but it's not gonna work, honey. Your family will love the show!

As you know, I'm famously great with kids. Follow Tiz the Grinch Holiday Talk Show on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Tiz the Grinch Holiday Talk Show early and add free right now by joining Wondry Plus.