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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.

Here's how to see life. Most people see life as a kind of race. They want to win. They want to get somewhere. They want to do it better than other people.

And certainly one can see how this approach can produce impressive results by creating a competition by creating a way to keep score. It's natural that one will do well by those metrics.

The problem is that life isn't a race. And even if it were, there's no evidence that we're all in the same race. There is no race. There is only a runner, the band Lucius sings in their song, two of us on the run.

The tie to stoicism there is not in the fact that the name of the band is the same name as Marcus Aurelius' step brother and co emperor. It's in the realization that while we are not racing each other, we are still playing a sport.

In fact, it's a harder sport because without an ability to win, we have to find new ways to measure and motivate ourselves.

Marcus Aurelius wrote about how if you want good in the world, you have to find it in yourself. He also wrote about what a sad sight it was when you looked at the people who were the most driven, the most competitive, the most angry.

Where are they now? He said not in some internal winners circle, they're dead and gone and forgotten. We're soon to be forgotten.

Indeed, we have to follow the lyrics to the song and just put one foot in front of the other because that's life. We do our best. We find motivation internally, intrinsically in realizing our potential and showing up and doing the work, not in comparison, not in victory because no such thing exists except over ourselves.

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