Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visitdailystoic.com. Do this, it's enough.

Marcus Aurelius didn't just study philosophy when he was young.

He didn't just pick a set of beliefs and stick with him.

No, to him, philosophy was a lifelong study, a process that he committed to.

That's why even as an old man, he was seen famously

headed off to attend the lectures from Sextus, the philosopher. And while this certainly

made him quite educated and quite smart, we can also imagine something else happening after

so many years of reading and discoursing and meditating. What undoubtedly happened is that as he got

older, the more he learned, the closer

he came to understanding Socrates's humility, the sense that the more one learns, the less

certain they are, they know. As John Adams, detailed in David McCullough's amazing biography,

wrote in his own old age, you are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer

I live, he said, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire,

the less I seem to know. Yet Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of

ageless universal principles. They found themselves boiling things down to their essence into real

and practical epithets for the self, as Marcus called them. Adams himself came up with just three

commands, which he passed on down to his granddaughter Caroline. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly.

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