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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 DailyStoic.com.

An honest dollar is an impressive thing. There's no dispute about the fact that many, if not most, of the ancient Stoics were rich. Zeno came from a merchant family.

Cato's great grandfather had been a successful farmer. Seneca was wealthy, and of course, so was Marcus Aurelius.

The problem with their fortunes was not the size, but how it was acquired. Both Zeno and Cato's wealth would have been impossible without the grueling and thankless labor of slaves.

Seneca grew rich in neurosurface. Marcus Aurelius never wanted to be emperor, but as he once told the Senate, he did not regard himself as possessing a single dollar or even a house to Marcus, all of his wealth truly belonged to Rome.

But still, we know now that no man should be king, that no one should sit on a palace built from the sweat and tears of millions of faceless citizens.

Clienthe is one of the earliest Stoics had no great fortune. Instead, he worked nearly all his life a series of humble jobs. He carried water for people's gardens. He crushed grain. He was a laborer by choice.

When a wealthy king offered him enough money to cease these laborers he refused, so was not to be corrupted. Every dollar Clienthe's earned, even if it wasn't many of them, was honestly made. Not one of them was stained by blood or tainted by injustice.

And isn't this a much more impressive fortune? It's not the quantity that we should care about. Something earnestly made and sold for a fair price, whether it's millions of units or a few dozen, that's honorable.

Something earned with real effort, that's honorable, whether it's earned by sweeping the floors or managing the company. The philosopher Naseem Teleb has joked that a person possesses true wealth when the money they turn down is sweeter than the money they accept.

And honest dollar is the only kind of dollar worth chasing or collecting. If only more Stoics had lived by this or had been strong enough to, if only more of us could find the strength to do this today, how much more impressive we would all be.

Obviously we try to earn an honest dollar here at Daily Stoic, at Daily Stoic Store, we thank you for the support. We try to source mostly almost exclusively from US manufacturers. We try to make and sell only things that we ourselves use. We constantly try to improve every facet of the business from packing to production customer service.

It's an honor to serve you. And of course it's an honor to have the new book out where we explore some of the lives we're just talking about.

Lives of the Stoics, the art of living from Xeno to Marcus Relays to support your local bookstore, support Amazon if you want. We appreciate it. We feel a book is honest labor, certainly a lot of labor.

And we love hearing that you guys read them. So check out store.dailystoic.com. You can actually get a sign copy of the new book there and appreciate it.

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