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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.

Welcome to Ask Daily Stoic. So the question we're starting with today is one we get a lot, which is like, how does a stoic deal with failure? How do we deal with step backs?

And this kind of hard question to answer because I think it's like, this is the core of what stoicism is, right? A stoic is all about bouncing back and rebounding from the things that life throws at us, right?

So when Mark really says like, you know, the impediment to action advances action, what stands and the way it comes the way that to me is like the core of stoicism.

It's deciding to see all the things that happen to you in life as opportunities. So like, I'm going through something now. I'm in the middle of this transaction that's going, hey, why are you and I don't like it?

And I wish that it had gone swimmingly and smoothly, but it didn't, right? And it might it might end up like sort of going completely pear shape or completely upside down.

So what I've been trying to remind myself through it is like, what can I learn from this experience? How can I be better for it? Right? What can I do inside of it that will make me better? Right?

So it's, is that having incomparable conversations? Okay, well, I'm going to have practice now in doing that. Is it being firm or drawing a line in a place where naturally I'd like to just not do that, right?

Is it learning and analyzing and thinking about the mistakes I made that contributed to that? That's how a stoic thinks about failure. And so, so a stoic walks your life and again, we're all humans. So we don't do it perfectly. But what a stoic tries to do is walk through life and see everything as an opportunity to practice virtue, right?

So a failure is a chance to get familiar with failure, right? To learn from it. A business issue is a chance to manage your temper or teach something with someone traffic is a chance to learn patience and accept things that are outside of our control.

A rude person, a bad friend of a trail is a chance to do the right thing even though you don't want to. It's a chance to practice forgiveness. That's what the stoics do. That's how we see failure.

You know, in my book, I just shorten markers is quote to like the obstacle is the way. And so to me, that's how the stoics see failure as the way forward. And then if you're not failing, you're not trying enough, you're not doing enough, you're not putting yourself out there enough. And as a result, you're not growing and getting as good as you can be.

All right, someone's asking like, how does a stoic respond to pain? And so I think it's important that we don't confuse uppercase stoicism and lowercase stoicism. Lowercase stoicism, I think, would posit that the stoics don't feel pain that they're invincible that they never get sad, whatever. That's not true. Stoke does feel pain. What a stoic tries to do is what we do after, right?

So, Santa could talk about look, if I punch you in the arm that's going to hurt, if I dump freezing cold water on you, that's going to shiver, you have these involuntary reactions. What do you do after? Right? So yes, there is a certain amount of endurance in this. You know, Mark is a realist is saying whenever you suffer pain, keep in mind that it's nothing to be ashamed of. And then it can't damage your intelligence.

And we'll keep you from acting rationally for the common good. And he quotes Epicuracy says, you know, pain is never unbearable or unending, right? But what about chronic pain? Well, eventually it does end, right? That Marcus really was a sufferer of chronic pain. And what he would try to tell himself is like, look, my death will bring an end to this pain. And that seems dark. But the point was not to believe that there was no light at the end of the tunnel that there was no end to this.

So he says, when they start to get you down, tell yourself that you are giving in to pain. So it's about having an attitude of cheerfulness that perseveres through the pain. And in daily stoke, I tell this story about Winston Churchill is walking across the street in New York City is about to engage in a lecture tour that he desperately needs for the money and in tomb. He gets struck by a taxi.

And it's extremely painfully very nearly dies. But he somehow manages to use his experience in the sort of perfect Winston Churchill way to get better. He starts writing articles about it in the newspaper. He loves the publicity. He uses it to catch up on a bunch of writing. He's put off. He says, nature is merciful and does not try her children man or beast beyond their compass. He says it is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear for the rest.

Live dangerously. Take things as they come. Dread nothing and all will be well. And I think that's the kind of attitude. You can't go through life trying to avoid pain. You can't go in life through life in fear of pain. You just have to keep going.

Bill Bradley says there's never been a great athlete who did not know what pain is. It's beautiful. There's no human, great human who has not experienced pain and loss.

But we've got to remember that the things we do in response to that pain whether it's getting angry, it's blaming others, it's taking pills, etc. This outlast hurt. That was that was sent because then anger outlast hurt. So does a lot of the things we try to do to escape pain.

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