Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our

daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic. My book, 366 Meditations

on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator,

translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation

from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world

to turn these words into works.

How to create change? Rosa Parks wasn't just some lady who happened to make a stand on

a bus one day. She was trained. She had attended NAACP meetings for years. She had gone to

the Highlander Folk School, which cultivated a generation of activists. In his fascinating

book, Wage in a Good War, Tom Ricks, who has a must listen to episode on the Daily Stoic

Podcast, he explains that each Highlander training session of one or two weeks began with

a strategic question. What do you want to do, they asked? And then it ended with a tactical

discussion of how to reach that outcome. What are you going to do?

Rosa Parks took pages of notes during her training. Friends would remark how much guts

you're in confident she was after she left. And when that fateful day came, when the bus

driver said, all of you make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats, she was ready.

She knew what she wanted, which was quality and respect. And when the police officers came,

she knew what she was going to do. She would go to jail over it. The woman met the moment

exactly as Epictetus said, we must be able to meet it with the reply. This is what

I trained for. One mistake that we make when we're looking back at these activists is

focusing only on the moral legitimacy of their grievances, accepting almost as a given

that they would triumph because they deserved to triumph. As we discussed on a more recent

...