Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, illustrated with stories

from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do.

And at the beginning of the week, we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of Stoic

intention for the week, something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave

you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it.

History repeats and it doesn't.

History is the same thing happening over and over again, Mark's really said there's

nothing new under the sun.

And yet like all things in philosophy, the opposite idea must be held true at the same

time. The Stoics would agree with Stanford professor Scott Sagan, who once said, things

that have never happened before happen all the time.

Is this a contradiction?

No, it's a tension, it's a balance, like yin and yang, these two opposing ideas actually

perfectly complement each other.

The Stoics studied both the patterns of human existence and practice pre-meditatio

and lorum, meditating on all the possible and improbable outcomes.

Markus really said that there was a rhythm to history and that a healthy mind should be

prepared for anything.

Senika said that the job of a leader is to study the past and that the only inexcusable

thing for a leader to say is I didn't think that could happen.

...