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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength,

insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the

2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoke.com.

Always give credit to something greater. It's almost a cliche at this point. A reporter walks into the locker room of a

victorious team and gets some version of the following quotes from the athletes who pulled it off. It was a team effort. We worked hard and got lucky out there.

I trusted in God and did my best. It's always a surprise to see someone so clearly talented and so obviously

responsible for what happened, giving credit for success to someone else. What's interesting also is how far back this tradition goes.

Around the first century AD, Plutarch wrote about how accomplished people give some credit for their success to the gods and to luck.

As when Tim O'Lean dedicated a temple to the goddess of chance after destroying the tyrannies in Sicily,

Python, when the Athenians were marveling at him and honoring him for killing Kotas, said, God did it through the agency of my hand.

One reason these conquerors did this was to avoid envy. And that's likely true for athletes today.

Make yourself too conspicuous and you attract enemies and unnecessary attention. But almost certainly the real reason is to keep ego at bay to stay humble.

Marcus Aurelius talked about avoiding imperialization, being stained by the power and success of what he had been given.

The ancient world, not unlike the history of sports, is filled with examples of people who took undue credit, who believed all the hype and shears and became worse for it.

The real pros focus on the things other people did right. They focus on where they themselves fell short because this attitude makes them better.

They knew that ego was the enemy. Did the stokes really believe that sacrifices made a difference? Maybe it probably also didn't hurt to actively practice crediting omens and rituals for success.

It was an easy way of giving credit to something bigger than them to remind themselves that they weren't totally in control and how big a role chants played in things.

That athletes are still considering this tradition thousands of years later is a sign that the practice works and that we should develop our own.

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What if you were trafficked into a cult over shot nine times or fell in love with a vampire or went into a minor surgery and woke up one week later, paralyzed. What would you do?

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