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

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

It's never an accident. It wasn't some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus Aurelius to be great amid disaster and

unbelievable power. It wasn't a coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave

and solitary figure standing against the tide. It wasn't an accident that earned Stockdale

the Medal of Honor in the Hanoi Hilton that allowed him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement and torture. No, it wasn't. It was Epictetus who said that

the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life threw at you with,

this is what I trained for. And that is precisely what these men had done. In fact, Marcus Arealist

thanks Rusticus at the beginning of meditations for teaching him that he needed to train and

discipline his character. Cato, as we said, trained his whole life in how he dressed to what he ate,

to how he spoke for some future moment when he would need to stand up,

defend the Roman Republic. And Stockdale? Stockdale liked to joke that his plea beer at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture and prison. And of course, his study of philosophy didn't hurt either.

And neither did his training in the Navy's Sear program, survive, evade, resist, escape.

And now that training program is built around much of what Stockdale learned from experience.

No one magically steps up in the big moments. No, we revert to our level of training.

Our true character comes out under pressure. So we must

train that character. We must develop our bodies. We have to put in the work. Because when

life's true tests arrive, and they will, we need to be ready to respond with both confidence

and confidence. And that comes from preparation, not luck. It is never

an accident. If you're running a business, you know the deal with most CRMs.

They are packed with a bunch of features you're never going to use, clunky interfaces,

and you spend a bunch of time just trying to find the basic info and then you stop using them.

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