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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. Or 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.

Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of Ask Daily Stoke. You send in your questions about stoicism, markets are really

about reading, writing, philosophy, ancient history, whatever it is. We kick stuff around. You can send those questions to info at dailystoic.com.

More specific questions, the better. Steve wrote in and he said, how can I get my wife interested in stoicism?

Why do you want your wife to be interested in stoicism? I think the stoic quip would be like focusing

on yourself, leave other people to their own development. Sometimes I think we project our own needs on other people.

There's a zen saying, when the student is writing the teacher appears, I think stoicism is not an evangelical religion.

You're not supposed to convert people. It doesn't need to be this thing you force on other people. It's there for the people that want it, but it's there primarily for you to be interested in improving

yourself. So I could only think about how I got my wife into stoicism. I remember when we met, I think we met in 2007. I had actually just read

Mark Serelias. I remember I bought it at borders. No, I bought it on Amazon. I was reading it and I was talking to her about it.

She was so interested from my conversation that she went to borders and bought a copy. Borders no longer in business, but we went through the copy a couple of months ago, and you can still see like this faded out

receipt inside the book. The point was she went and got it because she was interested in it, not because I forced it on her. I don't think this is something you can force on people.

And even if you could, I don't think it would work. And my evidence for this is, Seneca, one of the greatest jokes ever was supposed was like assigned to teach stoicism to Nero. And it didn't work out well.

We wrote the stale stoke email about a famous statue of the two of them. You can kind of see the statue is like Seneca trying to teach stoicism to Nero. And he's just like sort of sitting there like this is Nero and he won't pay attention.

And he's to me the lesson of that statue is like you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.

And so when I think about how you might teach it to a wife or a friend or a kid, I think it all comes down to the material is there, the wisdom is there.

You model it. You can tell them about it, but you can't do anything more than that. And ultimately you want to focus on what you control, which is what is the philosophy doing for you.

All right, Karen wrote in she just graduated from college. She's heading out into the world. What sort of advice would I have for someone getting started.

And is there anything sort of the stoic specifically have to say about that. Well, I don't know. I think when I think about my path, obviously education was important. Obviously, you know, sort of luck and privilege was important.

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