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, visit Dailystoic.com. Do you have this?

They pushed themselves on purpose.

Cato dressed outside the conventions of his day.

Zeno's philosophy teacher once spilled soup on Zeno in front of a large group of people.

Seneca practiced poverty.

Marcus Aurelius mentally rehearsed being criticized and misunderstood. Why did they put themselves in these uncomfortable positions?

To get comfortable with them, to get comfortable with themselves. There's a great new

profile of the writer Janet Malcolm, and she talks about one of the many benefits of this comfort,

with this comfort that the writer said she saw in Janet Malcolm.

She was comfortable saying no to invitation,

a photograph, a profile, an interview, a lecture,

if she didn't feel like doing it, which she mostly didn't,

profile says.

As the writer Zoe Heller put

it, that I think is a fantastic lesson for all women, you know, a polite firm, no thank you. As the writer

Alice Gregory told me, she is unwilling to temper the truth with all the kind of frilly-girly things we do

in conversation to soften things or to get people

...