When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself

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.

— from Takeoff Into Chaos · Win Your Inner Battles: Defeat the Enemy Within and Live With Purpose by Darius Foroux

In the book

When the hurricane is forecast and you must flee your home with no idea what you will find on your return, you take the prudent steps and then you pray — for yourself, and for everyone else caught under the same sky. Even Marcus Aurelius braced himself each morning by expecting the day's difficult people in advance, so their behavior could not knock him off his heading. None of this makes the sky calm. — Takeoff Into Chaos

Work itself is at its best when it is, all at once, excellent, engaging, and ethical. Marcus Aurelius began each day reminding himself that the people he'd meet would be ungrateful, arrogant, and dishonest — and that he would not let any of them implicate him in ugliness or turn him hard, because we were born to work together like the two hands, the two eyes, the upper and lower rows of teeth. And freedom, properly understood, is the engine of all of it: freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought. — True North (Ethics, Integrity, Truth, Values)

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