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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, visitdailystoic.com.

It calls for thee.

We know they can do better.

We know they were elected to do better. We know they swore an oath to do better.

We've been talking about our elected leaders in their many failures, that they refuse to stand up, that they refuse to risk their jobs, that they refuse to do the hard work of reaching across the aisle or tackling intractable, thankless problems. This is a problem,

no question. But as always, stoicism is not about them. It's about us. When we say that courage is calling, do we mean other people, or do we mean that the bell is tolling for us? The question,

as always, is, are we being brave enough? Are we doing our job?

It's easy to condemn and judge others. It's harder to turn that judgment around. As Seneca,

a hypocritical politician himself, it's worth noting, would say, we tend to notice the pimple on someone else,

ignoring that we ourselves are covered in sores. Think about the principles we are standing on.

Think of what we are willing to risk. Think of the intractable problems we have chosen to tackle

in our neighborhood, in our workplace, in our families.

Think of whether we are working with people we disagree with, or are we too afraid?

Are we embodying the traits that we would like to see in our leaders?

...