Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

Don't let it do this to you. Maybe it could have been avoided. Maybe it wasn't fair. Maybe it happened to you. You got

screwed over. You got humiliated. You were robbed of something you worked hard for. You screwed up big time.

And now you're in the middle of a scandal. You're at rock bottom. Deserved or not, preventable or not,

you're at the mercy of fate of the

market of a mob. The author John Fonte, whose story I told in an article many years ago for Medium

about the crazy publishing saga of his novel Ask the Dust, I'll link to that in today's show notes,

he had a number of bad breaks in his career.

It just didn't go the way that he wanted. And that could have made him angry. It could have turned

him into a drunk or a deadbeat, but it didn't. I think the one thing that a writer must avoid

is bitterness, John Fonte, told a journalist in 1979. I think it's the one fault that can destroy him, can shrivel him up.

I've fought it all my life.

It was that fight that his son admired most about his father,

that he soldiered on as a writer and was eventually rediscovered and rightly celebrated.

I'm not naive enough to think that

good work always wins out in the end, his son James Fonte explained. There are plenty of painters who

died in Auschwitz. I don't necessarily think there is justice in the world. It's just that my father

had the strength of character not to let it break him.

Injustices will befall us. Certainly they befell the Stoics.

Seneca was exiled, so was Epictetus. Others had their property confiscated. Others still were executed. Think of James Stockdale and how the public treated him after that disastrous vice-presidential

debate in 1992.

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