The advice below is not mine. I subscribe, via my school email, to something called "Daily Stoic" which is authored by Ryan Holiday. His blog made me want to read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, which I'm wading through while my oldest son reads Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
"What page are you on Dada? What book? You're going pretty slow, Dada."
The stoics make a lot of sense to me now and I find the philosophy helpful. I remember rejecting the idea of stoicism when I was about 17 and in high school, mostly because of an inadequate and superficial understanding that it meant approaching life without intensity and being intentionally unemotional and numb. I was very much into Thoreau at the time, or I should say I was into who I wanted Thoreau to be and I was busy thinking about how to live deep so I could suck the marrow out of life. Passion and fire were what I was after. Anyway, here's the entry that I'm copying and pasting today. (I'll try to file it under the "found" category." I'll get the hang of this blog sooner or later.)
"What page are you on Dada? What book? You're going pretty slow, Dada."
The stoics make a lot of sense to me now and I find the philosophy helpful. I remember rejecting the idea of stoicism when I was about 17 and in high school, mostly because of an inadequate and superficial understanding that it meant approaching life without intensity and being intentionally unemotional and numb. I was very much into Thoreau at the time, or I should say I was into who I wanted Thoreau to be and I was busy thinking about how to live deep so I could suck the marrow out of life. Passion and fire were what I was after. Anyway, here's the entry that I'm copying and pasting today. (I'll try to file it under the "found" category." I'll get the hang of this blog sooner or later.)
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Why do you speak so much? Because you need people to know how smart you are, right? You have to be heard. Yet, odds are: a good portion of the time you end up looking like an idiot.
This timeless truth is captured in a quote that’s been attributed to both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln (and many others): Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Part of what Stoicism teaches is that you should control what is under your control. How people see you is not—but whether or not you open your mouth is. Consider staying quiet. Or as Epictetus put it:
"Be silent for the most part, or, if you speak, say only what is necessary and in a few words. Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls you, but do not talk of ordinary things - of gladiators or horses races or athletes or of meats or drinks - these are topics that arise everywhere - but above all do not talk about men in blame or compliment or comparison. If you can, turn the conversation of your company by your talk to some fitting subject; but if you should chance to be isolated among strangers, be silent."Try silence. See what happens.
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