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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. Or each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the 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 DailyStoke.com.

Life comes at you fast, part two. Just two and a half years ago General Michael Flynn stood on the stage of the Republican National Convention and led some 20,000 people in a good many more at home and an impromptu chanting of lock her up, lock her up.

About his enemy Hillary Clinton, a few months later he was swept into the White House with the Trump administration, finding himself now the National Security Advisor to the most powerful man in the world.

It was an incredible second act for a man who had been unceremoniously fired by the previous president and whose sanity many had questioned when he first signed on with the new campaign. But that's life. It comes at you fast.

But then just 24 days into his new job Flynn was fired once more in this case for lying to the vice president about conversations he'd had with Sir J. Kisleyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Soon enough there was a special prosecutor breathing down his neck with criminal charges for lying to the FBI. On December 18th, a grand total of 29 months from his appearance on that stage in Cleveland, Michael Flynn found himself standing before Judge Emmett Sullivan.

Who had the power to decide whether it was he who would be locked up and possibly branded as a traitor. Again, life comes at you fast.

The purpose of today's emails not to gloat at the fall of Michael Flynn, a man who in a previous lifetime served his country honorably but to ring the reminder that all tragedies are supposed to ring, that our fates are always uncertain and that hubris only makes them more precarious.

It was ambition of the kind that Flynn had, the desire to get ahead or to get even at all costs that the Stoics warned against time and time again. Indeed, Senaq's own life was a cautionary tale that Flynn might have done well to study as he greedily gobbled up consulting and speaking fees from foreign entities and whose painful dance with power might have served as a deterrent to a man considering entering another controversial administration.

When we take shortcuts, when we fall in with the wrong crowd, when we act in ways we know run contrary to the principles we believe in, we are chipping away at our own security and our own peace of mind.

When we attack the flaws in other people and ignore our own or use that as a strategy to obscure our own, we are writing the end of our own tragedy.

Life comes at us fast, it is unmerciful and often poetic in the justice that it melts out, be careful, be ready and don't be your own worst enemy.

Epic Titus' line was how much longer are you going to wait until you demand the best for yourself?

I think he was really saying how long are you going to wait until you demand the best of yourself?

And for that reason we have created this new 14 day Stoic Challenge which is going to kick off on January 1st.

I hope you will check it out. It is 14 days of awesome Stoic based challenges that make you a better person, a better learner, a better thinker.

Whatever it is, I think you will like it, I am going to be doing it, it is an awesome community that goes along with it.

If you want to check it out you can go to dailystoic.com slash challenge.

But remember this closes on at 11.59pm on December 31st. If you want to kick the year off right I hope you join us dailystoic.com slash challenge.

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