Before You Get Angry Today, Listen To This
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to The Daily Stoic early and ad-free right now. Just join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. 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 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, 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 dailystoic.com. The actor Troy Baker has a strange little tattoo on his wrist.

the Roman symbol for two, and then the Roman symbol for one. It's basically three lines separated by a period. What does that mean? Why is that the first thing that he looks at each morning? What does it have to do with stoicism? Well, a dedicated reader of Marcus Aurelius' meditations would recognize the significance immediately because it's an allusion to one of the most powerful passages in the entire book.

When you wake up in the morning, per the Gregory Hayes translation, tell yourself the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, Marcus Aurelius wrote, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own, not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind and possessing a share of the divine."

So none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.

Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet and hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him. These are obstructions. Baker decided to get this tattoo after he got into a screaming argument with another actor. They both stormed off the set and went back to their hotels.

Here's the thing, Troy explained in an awesome interview with me on the Daily Stoic podcast. I could walk you through chapter and verse how I was justified in my anger, he said, justified in my argument. I could point out chapter and verse the fallacy of their argument. And Troy said he spent the next two days boiling with anger. But then, as a longtime student of the Stoics, he remembered that passage.

Why was he surprised? Why was he letting them implicate him in ugliness? Why was he working against them instead of with them? Why was he turning his back on them? So we got the tattoo as a reminder, and it's been with him ever since, calming him down in frustrating situations with frustrating people. And while we don't all have to get that passage permanently inked on our bodies, it wouldn't hurt to keep it always top of mind and to start each morning.

with it. Anyways, you can listen to the episode. It's one of our, I think, our best. You can watch it on YouTube. You can listen to it. I'll link to it in today's notes. You can also just grab a copy of Meditations and read that passage to yourself every morning. We've got the Gregory Hayes translation at the Painted Porch, which I'll link to. And then, of course, we've got the Leatherbound Meditations, which you could check out as well. I'll link to that or just go to store.dailystoke.com.

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