The Daily Stoic - You Need To Take The Unfamiliar Road | Think About It From The Other Person's Perspective

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

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And I've been doing it now, crazy me, at least 15 years I've been staying in Airbnbs, basically since it came out. I love Airbnb and you should check it out for your next trip. Welcome 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 DailyStstoic.com. You need to take the unfamiliar road. We have our habits, we have our practices, we have the way we like to do things, the way we like to eat, the way we like to get to work. It's comfortable, it's also boring. It makes us lazy and fragile. General Sherman, the legendary Civil War strategist, once explained that he lived by an old rule, never to return by the road I had come.

He didn't want to retrace his steps. He wanted to blaze new trails, cover new territory, challenge himself. And this philosophy isn't just military wisdom. It's a blueprint for personal transformation. The ancient Stoics understood this deeply. In Meditations, Mark Ceruleus writes about holding his chariot reins with his weaker hand, not just as an exercise, but as a metaphor for embracing discomfort and doing things in a new way. He realized that true strength comes from developing ourselves in all directions, not just where we're capable or secure. And this isn't always easy, but neither is life.

Epictetus said that when a challenge is put in front of us, to think of ourselves as an athlete getting paired with a tough competitor or a sparring partner. You want to be Olympic class, he said. This is going to take some sweat to accomplish. Yes, the unfamiliar path is harder. Yeah, it requires more effort. But as any athlete will tell you, growth happens at the edge of discomfort and resistance.

Iron sharpens iron. Each challenge makes you stronger. That's the whole aim behind the Daily Stoic Spring Forward Challenge, which we do every year. It's designed to bring you a sense of intention and clarity, help you simplify your life, challenge yourself and relationships, move you closer to what you're capable of being.

And we want you to join us in the Spring Forward Challenge. I do it every year. Thousands of stoics do it every year all over the world. It's gonna be 10 days of actionable stoic-inspired challenges, video messages from me me a call where we get together and debrief on the progress. You can ask me some questions in there. It's going to be awesome. And I don't want you to let another season pass by while you stay in your comfort zone. I

want you to join me and thousands of other stoics all over the world as we take an unfamiliar road, push our boundaries, challenge ourselves to do the harder, the different, the more untraditional way. And it's gonna be awesome. It all begins with that first step though, that commitment to not do it the way that you've always done it. I wanna have you join us in there, dailystoic.com slash spring.

And remember, if you sign up for Daily Stoic Life, you can get this challenge and all of our challenge as part of that membership is a value of seven, 800 bucks. It's awesome. The unfamiliar road awaits. Will you take it? I hope so. Join us either in Daily Stoic Life at dailystoiclife.com

or just join us in this challenge. Start small, dailystoic.com slash spring. I will see you in there. This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoic Journal, 366 Days of Writing and Reflection on the Art of Living by yours truly and my wonderful collaborator Stephen Hanselman, who I also worked on the Daily Stoic with. Today's entry, Think about it from the other person's perspective. We tend to assume the best about our own intentions and the worst about other people's. Then we wonder why life is so full of

conflict. The Stoics flip this habit around, reminding themselves to be suspicious of their own first reaction and approach others first with sympathy. Powerful people are often surprisingly terrible at behaving this way, but Marcus Aurelius, the most powerful man on earth during his reign, was renowned for his humanity in dealing with others. He told himself always to take a moment to remember his own failings and to contemplate how another might see the situation. He reminded himself, as we should, that most people are trying their best, even though that's easy to lose sight of in the rough

and tumble of daily life. Let's remember that today and think about each interaction from more than just our own point of view. That's the Daily Stoic Journal weekly entry. And we've got some quotes from Marcus Aurelius here. He says, Whenever someone has done wrong by you, immediately consider what notion of good or evil they had in doing it. For when you see that, you'll find compassion instead of astonishment or rage. For you yourself may have had the same notions of good and evil or similar ones, in which case you'll make an allowance for what they've done. But if you no longer hold the same notion, you'll be more readily gracious for their error." —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 7, 26. And then he says,

when your sparring partner scratches or headbutts you, you don't then make a show of it or protest or view him with suspicion or as plotting against you. And yet you keep an eye on him, not as an enemy or with suspicion, but with a healthy avoidance. You should act this way with all things in life. We should give a pass to many things with our fellow trainees.

For, as I've said, it's possible to avoid without suspicion or hate." You know, I tell the story and stillness is the key. I open part one, the perception part of the book, the story of Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy and Khrushchev face off over some nuclear ballistic missiles placed on the island of Cuba. And what's so remarkable about this moment, why I look at Kennedy and why I think he embodies

what Marcus Aurelius is talking about in both senses, both in the, why did they do this? What are they trying to do? And also, people are not great. They're gonna try to cheat or pull one over on you, but you can't let that break you or make you bitter. You've got to be cognizant and aware of it. Kennedy thinks not just what he's gonna do,

but he's conscious enough to think, what is Khrushchev going to do? What is Khrushchev trying to do with this? And in fact, Khrushchev's real fatal calculation is that he doesn't have a good read on Kennedy. He'd sort of bullied Kennedy at a conference, had seen Kennedy bungle the Bay of Pigs. He thought he knew Kennedy,

and he thought he knew America, but he didn't. He couldn't conceive of how America would react to these missiles right on that island. And Kennedy though realizes, especially when his military advisors are telling him, you gotta bomb Cuba, you gotta bomb the shit out of Cuba, we gotta go into a void World War III. Kennedy knows that to do that,

he thinks about Khrushchev, how they're in the same position. They're both leading these sort of loose coalitions and with divergent interests and are human beings, but also heads of state. He's really able to think about Khrushchev's position. And he says, look, I'm not worried even about what Khrushchev's going to do in response to what I'm going to do.

I'm worried about step six or seven in this chain of escalation. We think about things from people's perspective, not just because empathy is good, not just because justice is important, but strategically people's perspective, not just because empathy is good, not just because justice is important, but strategically it's essential, right? When I was in public relations, you would see people get so consumed with the truth of what they had to say or their own experience or their own point of view,

they couldn't concede that the reporter has their own interests, that the public has their own interests and position. To effectively navigate the world, to be successful, you've got to understand other people's perspective. You gotta think about what's going on with them. And this allows you to not only be more patient, more forgiving and more gracious as Marcus says,

but it also allows you to be more effective and successful at whatever it is that you are doing. So I urge you today to spend some time practicing, let's call it strategic empathy. It will make you better. But most importantly, as we saw in the Kennedy and Cuban Missile Crisis example, it may well save the world. It makes the world a better place if we are more empathetic with each other. As Seneca said, we're all wicked people in a wicked world.

If we can understand this, we can be kind and patient and tolerant and understanding. We will all get more of what we want and need. 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

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