Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

The low road will always dog you.

That passage from Marcus Aurelius about how the impediment to action advances

action, that what stands in the way becomes the way, do you know what he was actually talking about

specifically? It wasn't overcoming an injury or a layoff or financial collapse. Wasn't about a

reversal on the battlefield.

It was talking about difficult people.

It was saying that frustrating, infuriating, thoughtless people, they are opportunities.

When someone is a jerk to you, it's an opportunity to practice virtue and how you respond,

and not being a jerk back, by forgiving them, by standing up for yourself, by empathizing with what they're going through. Of course, when someone is being difficult,

you're tempted to give it right back. You're tempted to go, oh, this is how we're behaving

these days. This is what passes for acceptable behavior, but you shouldn't.

On a recent episode of the podcast, we were talking with the novelist Maria Semple,

who has this amazing book called Go Gentle, which is about a stoic philosopher.

She signed a bunch of copies.

We have them in the painted porch.

It was an Oprah Book Club pick.

One of the things she shared was a reminder that she relies on when she's dealing with difficult people. Let me play it for you real fast. A quote that I think I made up that's one of

my favorite quotes is the low road will always dog you. Like that basically the high road,

you can go to sleep feeling good about yourself. The low road, you might, ten years from now, being, like, walking down the street and going, why did I have to be,

like, cutting to that person in that situation for no reason? And so I think just on a practical

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