Can You Just Shut Up? | Stoicism vs. Epicureanism: Enemies or Allies?

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Can you just shut up? Before they finish their sentence, we're ready with our response, ready to show them how smart we are, how much we know, or how quickly we can solve the problem. But what would happen if we shut up and listened? If we stopped trying to win the conversation and started trying to understand the person in front of us?

That's what Marcus Realis tried to do. He reminded himself to get into the habit of listening attentively to anything that anyone says, and to enter as much as he could the mind of the speaker. Now, this is harder than it sounds, because to enter another person's mind, even for a moment, we first have to get out of our own head. We have to stop rehearsing our own answer, stop preparing the clever thing we're going to say next. We have to give the other person room to reveal what they are thinking.

Robert Carroll, one of the great biographers of the last century, He turned that ancient advice into a practical interviewing technique. He talks about this in his book Working, which I love, I've raved about, I'll link to it in today's show notes. He explained that when he's waiting for the person he's interviewing to break silence by giving me a piece of information, he says he writes SU for shut up in his notebook. He says, if anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of SUs there.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (25 minutes, 3,804 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.