It doesn't matter what other people say or think. Approval and disapproval are equally meaningless. What matters is what you know is right, and whether you do it.
"The Stoics say: it's not that death is in the future, but that we're dying every minute, every day. Every time we see the sun set, every time we get a haircut, every time we watch a few seconds tick on the clock—you have to remind yourself: that is time you will never get back. Time is not just our most precious resource, but it's tick, tick, ticking away—it is non-renewable. So the idea of memento mori for the Stoics was that time is fleeting, it is escaping us, it is killing us as we are killing time. Death is there in every sunset and every sunrise, no matter how beautiful. Remind yourself of that little bittersweet fact so you never take another one or another minute for granted."
"I don't know if you've ever experienced anyone with Alzheimer's—it's the first time I have closely. What it really does, as I'm observing, is it burns away all your extraneous thought patterns. And what remains is my mother has five or six different conversational lanes down which she can travel now. All the others are gone. And the main conversational lane down which she travels now is the one of love. She's so sweet, she's so loving, all she wants to do is express love. That's all she wants to do. And that's how I remember her—that's actually who she is. I feel like her essence has been returned. So it's made me think, what if before we get the Alzheimer's we could clear away all the extraneous bullshit and just go down the lanes that really matter?"
WHAT RYAN HOLIDAY IS READING:
"If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."
The key to improvement in any area of life, according to the Stoics, is having the courage to appear silly and foolish.
As Ryan writes in Courage is Calling (which, as we mentioned at the top, is just $1.99 everywhere you get your ebooks), "It's ironic, the Stoics would say, that for all our selfish cares about ourselves, we seem to value other people's opinions about us more than our own. The freed slave Epictetus says, 'If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid.' Can you do that? You'll have to."
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