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.

No one is truly self-made.

After he lost everything in a shipwreck, Zeno washed up in Athens and walked into a bookstore,

where the bookseller happened to be reading dialogues from Socrates.

Thus introduced to philosophy, he would go on to become one of the most well-known

and well-respected thinkers of his time, advising princes and kings in a generation of Greeks.

That school, founded on the Stoopoea, would become Stoicism, a philosophy which endures to this day.

On the surface, Zeno's story is extraordinary. Born as an upper-class, wealthy merchant,

he was forced to start over, build himself up from scratch, becoming truly a self-made man.

But this is misleading, as most success narratives are, because Zeno would not have become Zeno without

meeting Cretes,

a teacher nicknamed the door opener for what he did for so many students.

Indeed, there is no great man or woman whose story does not involve being helped, guided,

and inspired by other great men and women.

There would be no Epictetus, as he studied under Musonius Rufus.

There would be no Seneca without Adelis, no Chrysippus without Cleanthes, and no Cleanthes without Zeno.

Why do you think Marcus Aurelius opens meditations with a list of the 17 influential figures who taught him, nurtured him, inspired him, helped him.

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