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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.

You'll be called worse by better.

Marcus Aurelius was the public face of an empire. Seneca published books and plays. Cato and Cicero ran for office.

Epictetus was a slave to a powerful Roman at his whim and mercy. In other words, they knew what it was like to be criticized. They knew what it was like to be received warmly by the audience

and not so warmly. They were subject to withering abuse talked about as if they were not standing

right there or as if they didn't have normal human feelings. But of course they did. But what

stoicism was there to do was to help them endure the pains and blows of feedback and critique and attack. If only they really knew me, Epictetus once joked, they'd say even worse things. This was his way of making light of the cruel things that he would have often heard by his abusive owner.

We care about ourselves more than other people, Marcus Reelis writes with bafflement in meditations,

but care about other people's opinions more than our own.

In another passage, he reminds himself to consider the character and the habits of the person attacking him,

thinking about what they were doing in private just a few minutes ago.

These public-facing stokes would have loved the response of the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau

when he was told that Richard Nixon had called him an asshole.

I have been called worse things by better people. He would later write, being criticized is part of the job. So is being misunderstood.

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