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

Life endures. That's what it does. Right now, this feels like an unprecedented crisis. The global economy has stopped. Literally millions of people are unemployed.

Scientists are racing to find a cure. Doctors are racing against time to save patients. City governments are racing to find a place to bury the bodies. It's a nightmare. Will we ever survive this?

Well, one place to find an answer is to look to the past. Marcus Arelius endured 15 years of the Antonine plague. It was worse than anything we are experiencing now.

And though he eventually succumbed to it, Rome survived for hundreds of years more. The greatest achievements of humankind still lay in the future.

Wendels, the men to manufacturers, the challenge coins we sell here at DailyStoke, opened for business in the late 1800s. There have been difficult moments in its 100 plus years in business.

But it has survived two world wars plus the Cold War in 9-11. It stayed in business through the Spanish influenza in the 1957 flu pandemic.

The building where the DailyStoke HQ is located, where this is being recorded on Main Street in Bastrop, Texas, dates to roughly the same period, which means it endured through the panic of 1907, the Great Depression, the energy crisis of the 1970s, the crash of 1987, the tech bubble.

And more recently, the Great Recession, it has also survived a fire, bankruptcies, divorces, mistakes, and disagreements.

That's not to say that any of these crises were easy. Lives were lost, jobs were lost, families were torn apart. There was pain, anxiety, fear, frustration. It's sad to think about that.

But there is also something uplifting, even inspiring in it too. We kept going. We pushed through. We endured.

That's what we humans do. We keep going. We survive. When markets looked at the past and catalogued the same things happening over and over and over again, it was making the same observation.

He was reminding himself that life is remarkably resilient and persistent. That much of what seems overwhelming in the moment will eventually blend in with ordinary history.

And the same will be true of this pandemic. It will recede into the past. It will become a footnote in your life.

Because the best days may still lay ahead, especially if we commit to making them so.

And that's one of the reasons we've been working on and talking so much about this daily stoic, a lifetime challenge.

Who knows how much longer this is going to go on, but what you can guarantee is two weeks of productive, focused work on strategies and habits

will make you better. You can decide to use this time productively that we didn't control that it happened.

We do control how we respond. So invite you to come do that with us with me at dailystoic.com slash a lifetime.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early and ad free with Wondering Plus in Apple podcasts.

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