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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 another episode of Ask Daily Stoke. You send in questions, we answer them inspired by stoicism. I'm dropping my papers like crazy.

So today's question is how can I get better at saying no? This is something I'm really bad at and I get the feeling that the stoics were not graded at naturally anyway.

I mean, Santa could not have been too good at saying no because he agreed to work for Nero and he refused to leave for far too long.

But you know, in Meditations, Marcus really says like ask yourself in every moment is this essential? Like do I need to do it? Is it a real obligation? Is it actually important?

And the truth is a lot of the things that we get pressured into doing are not necessary, right?

They're things that we're doing because everyone else is doing them. We're doing them because they showed up in our inbox.

We're doing them because somebody offered us some amount of money for them. We're not really asking is this essential?

Is this what I was put on the planet to do if this was by the last day of my life, would I do it?

And so if we can ask ourselves this question, I think generally will be better. I have a sign above my desk that a guy named Jonathan Fader, he's a brilliant sports psychologist. He sent it to me.

It's a picture of Oliver Sacks in his office Oliver Sacks in the pictures on the phone and then above him is a sign and just as N O exclamation point and it's just a reminder to me like I have to say no early on in your career

you have to say yes to everything because you're trying to get established. But as you get older you realize like oh man, I don't have an unlimited amount of time.

I don't have unlimited resources. I have to say no to things. And I will say that one of the things that having kids has helped me with is realizing I think before I was okay harming myself and harming even my wife or my health by saying the

estethings I didn't need to be doing that was too much for me to do. But now that I have kids I realize like oh I am taking this time from them. I promise them all my time. Now obviously I have to cross some of that back for work.

Right. But beyond that beyond the things that required to survive to you know to to feel fulfilled as a human being myself. Everything left over belongs to my two sons.

And so the idea that I'm just going to fritter that away because somebody wants me on their podcast or someone sent me some random email or someone wants to pay me $10 to go do something is ridiculous right you are you are saying yes you're saying no to something else.

So one of the things I always think about is what am I saying no to and is that actually a more important thing.

So one of the questions we get in the most often this is how do I teach my kids about stoicism. Well you know the the stoics like do you look at Kato's life and Santa Claus life and Marcus releases life one of the things they had it wasn't their parents teaching them about stoicism although Kato clearly taught his daughter Porsche about it.

So one of the things I'm thinking about with my kids is obviously school is important obviously it's legally an obligation but like who are teachers or tutors I can bring into their life on a one off basis or for a month or for a year who are really great instructors I could bring in and have them teach them.

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