Don't let yourself be surprised
Posted: Wed Feb 12, 2025 9:29 am
Hello and thank you for joining me for this new episode of Walk with Johan. It's a pleasure to have you with me today for this episode, as usual, of personal development. And today, we're going to talk about surprise. You saw it, the title of this episode is "don't let yourself be surprised". You'll see that this episode is very practical, it's something that we can really use in our daily lives and that's what I like to do in this podcast, present little tips or little lessons that make a difference. You rarely have magic tips, you never have magic tips, but you have lots of little tips that can really help you improve your life, quite simply.
Before we get to the content, I would like to ask you to take a few moments to leave a rating, to leave 5 stars for this podcast regardless of the application you use, whether it's on Apple Podcast or on Android or even on the free mobile application of Français Authentique. If you take 2 minutes to leave 5 stars, it will obviously make us very very happy.
So what I was telling you is that this episode switzerland whatsapp number data is going to be an incentive, an encouragement to prepare so as not to be surprised, to know where we are actually going, before starting something, to know the positive things that await us but also to keep in mind the negative things.
And to illustrate this, I'm going to take a quote from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. So it's been about 2,000 years since this quote was written or at least was spoken and I'm going to tell you. I find it very practical and it speaks for itself. So Epictetus told us: "If you go to the public baths, remember that there are people who splash, who push, who insult and who steal. Don't be surprised if that happens."
So again, it's funny, because when you see the way we are taught philosophy in high school today, and when you read this quote, you see that there is really something that has been missed, in my opinion, in our teaching, because I would have preferred... So I'll digress. But when I was taught philosophy in my final year of high school, I would have preferred to be taught things like that rather than overly theoretical things, biographies, etc. But that's another subject. In any case, that's very practical.
We are often all a little naive when we start an activity and we will be offended by certain things. This is exactly what Epictetus says. In their time, when they went to the public baths, so they went to bathe with other people, well there were already people who were not paying attention and who splashed others, while someone was quiet, who, themselves, were not paying attention and got wet, sent water on others, splashed them. There were people who did not want to wait and who, instead of waiting 3 seconds for someone to pass, well jostled them, shouldered them, there was contact between their bodies, even insulted them by complaining and saying rude things. There were even thieves.
And all of this, in fact, Epictetus' message is that it is unfortunately part of the experience, it is part of the experience of going to the public baths. And often, we tend to say to ourselves: "Well I'm going to go to the public baths" and we only focus on the positive, so I go into water, preferably hot water, and I'm going to be very good, it's going to be great, I'm going to relax, there won't be any noise. We have an idealized version of what public baths are in fact, even if today we rarely go to public baths. We can go to the thermal baths to relax. But the idea is to say to ourselves: "we must not idealize something".
Before we get to the content, I would like to ask you to take a few moments to leave a rating, to leave 5 stars for this podcast regardless of the application you use, whether it's on Apple Podcast or on Android or even on the free mobile application of Français Authentique. If you take 2 minutes to leave 5 stars, it will obviously make us very very happy.
So what I was telling you is that this episode switzerland whatsapp number data is going to be an incentive, an encouragement to prepare so as not to be surprised, to know where we are actually going, before starting something, to know the positive things that await us but also to keep in mind the negative things.
And to illustrate this, I'm going to take a quote from the Stoic philosopher Epictetus. So it's been about 2,000 years since this quote was written or at least was spoken and I'm going to tell you. I find it very practical and it speaks for itself. So Epictetus told us: "If you go to the public baths, remember that there are people who splash, who push, who insult and who steal. Don't be surprised if that happens."
So again, it's funny, because when you see the way we are taught philosophy in high school today, and when you read this quote, you see that there is really something that has been missed, in my opinion, in our teaching, because I would have preferred... So I'll digress. But when I was taught philosophy in my final year of high school, I would have preferred to be taught things like that rather than overly theoretical things, biographies, etc. But that's another subject. In any case, that's very practical.
We are often all a little naive when we start an activity and we will be offended by certain things. This is exactly what Epictetus says. In their time, when they went to the public baths, so they went to bathe with other people, well there were already people who were not paying attention and who splashed others, while someone was quiet, who, themselves, were not paying attention and got wet, sent water on others, splashed them. There were people who did not want to wait and who, instead of waiting 3 seconds for someone to pass, well jostled them, shouldered them, there was contact between their bodies, even insulted them by complaining and saying rude things. There were even thieves.
And all of this, in fact, Epictetus' message is that it is unfortunately part of the experience, it is part of the experience of going to the public baths. And often, we tend to say to ourselves: "Well I'm going to go to the public baths" and we only focus on the positive, so I go into water, preferably hot water, and I'm going to be very good, it's going to be great, I'm going to relax, there won't be any noise. We have an idealized version of what public baths are in fact, even if today we rarely go to public baths. We can go to the thermal baths to relax. But the idea is to say to ourselves: "we must not idealize something".