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, visitdailystoic.com. This is the secret to dealing with people.

Reading meditations, you might get the impression that Marcus Aurelius didn't particularly like people.

He writes about how they frustrate, annoy and disappoint us, how they fall short, how they fail us, even how they stab us in the back.

Not just sometimes, but often.

In the morning, Marcus says in book two of meditations, remind yourself that the people I deal with

today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.

Yet he adds that we can't let this drag us down.

We shouldn't let these people implicate us in their ugliness.

Instead of being pessimistic, he was trying to help us avoid being caught off guard by the flaws of others,

to not allow our emotions to be triggered, especially emotions like anger or hatred. And then, of course,

there is the most critical part of this exercise, actually putting yourself in other people's shoes

to understand why they are acting this way. Even Marcus Aurelius's idea that the obstacle is the way

isn't about accomplishing grand heroic feats.

Rather, he's talking about dealing with difficult people, how each challenging interaction with

someone, especially a jerk, is actually an opportunity to practice virtue. It's easy to connect

with someone who's just like you. But developing empathy for those we don't

naturally understand or even like, caring about them and acting in a way that's mutually beneficial,

...