In this episode, we discuss how we can’t control other people, but we can’t control ourselves, and that is the best we can do to make the world a better place.
Full Transcript
Hi Everyone, welcome to the You’re Daily Cup of Joe Podcast, with your host Joe Bautista. In this podcast, my goal is to give you quick lessons that you can reflect on in your journal so you can grow yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually and have a better career, better relationships, and better personal finances while you enjoy your morning cup of coffee.
I’m also the author of the book “More You Know, More You Grow: How to Get Better Every Day”. In this book, I wrote down over 30 tips to help you grow in those four cornerstones. I’m also the founder of Grow With Joe, where I combine self-development coaching and financial planning for Latino Professionals.
In today’s episode, we are going to talk about how we should have high standards for ourselves, but forgiving of others. This is a principle from the Stoic philosophy and Marcus Aurelius, one of the most famous Stoic philosophers said that the following:
“When you wake up in the morning, 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, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And 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, 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 unnatural.”
Even though I know this quote, I still fail at times, but then when I’m reminded of this quote, I realized that this is just part of nature. If people knew better, they would do better.
People learn more from experiences than they do from hear stories and reading statistics. Ten thousand years ago, people didn’t do probability calculations to see what they should do, they just went off these gut feeling. And if they realized that doing this one thing caused harm, they shouldn’t do it again, and the same thing when someone experiences pleasure, that meant they should do it again.
But the times have changed and we live in a much more complex society. Instead of worrying about your village or community, know you have to know things about the world because every day we have things introduced to our lives that came thousands of miles away. But people still live in the tribal mindset where they just think about the things they see on a daily basis and it causes them not to consider everything. Plus it is just easier to focus on our own pleasure and avoid pain. Plus when we’re dealing with people, we don’t see what is going on in their lives behind the scene, we just see the person in front of us, and they seem like normal capable people.
So this is why we need to set high standards for ourselves and be forgiving of others because they didn’t have the same experience as others. Most people don’t go through Marine Corps boot camp and probably never will but what they can see is my example of how I’m setting the bar.
Plus there are too many things to think about in today’s society and if you focus on all the information, then you would never get anything done. For myself, I work a lot and I don’t have time to follow every problem in the world, but what I can do is try to provide more value into the world than what I take. And the way I can do that is forgiving others and help raise the standards.
The way I raise my standard is by learning, doing what I say I’m going to do, to focus on doing important things versus focus on being an important person, and by turning into the man that philosophy wishes to make me into. If I can just focus on getting one percent better in each of these areas every day, then I’m going to provide a lot of value to this world and set the bar higher.
And if someone is not up to the standard, I just need to be forgiving of them and focus on setting the example.
And that’s it for today’s episode, to summarize it, have high standards for yourself, but forgiving of others. This is going to take discipline and courage to act this way. There are no breaks in developing your character as a person. You can take breaks with your mind though. So if you need to take a break to recover, then do this, but be prepared to keep climbing. And there is always room for improvement since it’s the biggest room on this planet. And if someone lets you down, then that means that they don’t know better and are acting in according to their nature. Sometimes you can influence change and other times you can’t, but don’t discourage by not being able to change everyone, just focus on setting the example and soon enough you can get more people to follow your suit, and then this will create the positive change that we need on this planet.
If you would like to get the journal questions for today’s episode, you can sign-up for my monthly journaling subscription newsletter, where you get daily journal questions Monday through Friday, and as a bonus, you will also get my time management course and my personal development cheat sheet. You can get all this for $13/mo, which is less than the cost of an audible subscription and it’s less work to gain more wisdom. You can get this offer at growwithjoe.me/journal
Thanks for listening today! To get a free copy of my Audiobook “More You Know, More You Grow: How to get better every day” just go to my website growwithjoe.me/book and you can download it right there.
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Thanks for joining me today and remember if you go with Joe, you can grow with Joe, cause Joe knows Dough.
*Music outro
