Strict with Yourself I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite writers. We’ve featured a bunch of his books including The Obstacle Is the Way, The Daily Stoic, Ego Is the Enemy, and Stillness Is the Key. He’s currently working on “The Stoic Virtue Series” in which he’s creating a new book for each of the cardinal virtues of Stoicism: Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Wisdom. We briefly chatted about the first book in the series: Courage Is Calling. Today we’re going to chat about an Idea from the second book in the series: Discipline Is Destiny. We’re going to talk about an Idea that didn’t make it into the Note. It’s from a chapter called “Tolerant with Others. Strict with Yourself.” Ryan tells us: “’I am prepared to forgive everybody’s mistakes,’ Cato the Elder said, ‘except my own.’ Ben Franklin, many generations later, would put forth an even better rule: ‘Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.’ Or as Marcus Aurelius put it, Tolerant with others, strict for yourself.” That’s Today’s +1. Let’s be tolerant with others—looking for their VIRTUES and forgiving their mistakes. Let’s be strict with ourselves—looking for our vices and getting to work on them. We have more than enough work to do on ourselves. Let’s do it. TODAY.
