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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.

Alright, so we are starting a new segment called Ask Daily Stoke. So people can send in questions on Twitter, at DailyStoke, you can send them in Facebook, at DailyStoke.

You can email info at DailyStoke.com and you can ask us your pressing, most interesting, most provocative questions about Stoicism and I will try to answer them. And then this will go up on the weekend on our podcast, DailyStoke.

And we'll also go up on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash DailyStoke. So the first question we've got here, and this is one I actually get a lot of email, it's, how would you explain Stoicism to a kid? Right, and there's this awesome stuff.

I love bread and I love, called explain it to me like I'm five, right? And so I've always been a big believer too. If you can't explain something simple to a kid, you probably don't understand it.

So if I was trying to talk to your kid about Stoicism, I wouldn't tell them who Marcus really is was, I wouldn't tell them about Seneca's complicated history with Nero, I wouldn't try to explain, you know, epictetus, what I would focus on instead is like the core lesson.

I don't even think I would go with the four virtues, right? Wisdom, justice, moderation and courage, because I think even that can go over their head. I'd give them what I think is the simplest, most core lesson of Stoicism, right?

Again, this doesn't require dates, it doesn't require names, it doesn't require anything. It just requires this simple idea. And it comes to us from I think all the Stoics, there's not one that I would get, but it's you don't control what happens to you in life, you control how you respond.

And you can see how like instantly this is something you can give your son or your daughter, you can say, look, if someone pushes you down, you don't control it, you don't like it, you don't want it to happen, you wish it didn't happen, but you do control how you respond, you control whether you hit them back, you control whether you tell a teacher, you control whether you cry, you control how you respond to what happens to them, right?

You'd say like, look, you couldn't go outside earlier because it was raining. So you had a choice, right? Did you cry about it? Did you get upset about it? Did you play me? Did you throw a temper tantrum? Or did you just decide to play games in your room instead, right? Did you decide to build a fork instead, right? What are the things we do instead of the things we can't do because of the things that are outside of our control? And I know that seems really simple, but if it was actually that simple, I think that's what I think is the most important thing to do.

I think that adults would be better at it. And so the earlier you can teach your kids that like, look, the vet, like there's this huge circle of everything that's happening in the world, then there's the tiny percentage of it that we control.

And most of what we control is in response to those things that we don't control. And when we realize this, we have an incredible power. We have the ability to be resilient, we have the ability to be creative.

So almost by accepting some powerlessness, we embrace a great power. And I think that's what you want to arm your kids with.

I would say like, look, you're little right now. So you're probably used to a lot of things not being in your control.

People tell you what to do, people tell you what you can and can't do, people yell at you, people push you around, bigger kids don't let you do things you want to do.

So that's unfortunate, right? But you also have this extreme power is that you decide how you're going to respond to these things, right?

You control how you respond. And look, I think I'd be honest with your kids that like, you struggle with this. That Marcus are really is the emperor of Rome. He struggled with this, right?

And yet all the great things that they did that you've been able to do are fundamentally related to this attitude. The decision to control how we respond to external events, it decides who we're going to be in this life.

And if they could learn this, if they can embrace it, they'll the best life ever, no one will truly be able to boss them around because they will be the boss.

They're the boss of their feelings, their thoughts and their decisions. And that to me is the core of what stoicism is about. So to summarize, right?

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