No One is Truly “Self-Made” | The Philosophy Behind High Achievers
The Daily Stoic
Daily Stoic | Backyard Ventures
4.6 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The myth of the self-made man is just that, a myth. There has never been such a thing.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation |
| 0:11.7 | designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. |
| 0:18.8 | Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of |
| 0:24.2 | history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, |
| 0:33.0 | and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. |
| 0:40.3 | For more, visitdailystoic.com. |
| 0:43.0 | No one is truly self-made. |
| 0:59.3 | After he lost everything in a shipwreck, Zeno washed up in Athens and walked into a bookstore, |
| 1:04.2 | where the bookseller happened to be reading dialogues from Socrates. |
| 1:08.5 | Thus introduced to philosophy, he would go on to become one of the most well-known |
| 1:12.1 | and well-respected thinkers of his time, advising princes and kings in a generation of Greeks. |
| 1:18.4 | That school, founded on the Stoopoea, would become Stoicism, a philosophy which endures to this day. |
| 1:24.9 | On the surface, Zeno's story is extraordinary. Born as an upper-class, wealthy merchant, |
| 1:30.8 | he was forced to start over, build himself up from scratch, becoming truly a self-made man. |
| 1:37.8 | But this is misleading, as most success narratives are, because Zeno would not have become Zeno without |
| 1:43.5 | meeting Cretes, |
| 1:44.8 | a teacher nicknamed the door opener for what he did for so many students. |
| 1:49.6 | Indeed, there is no great man or woman whose story does not involve being helped, guided, |
| 1:54.3 | and inspired by other great men and women. |
| 1:57.1 | There would be no Epictetus, as he studied under Musonius Rufus. |
| 2:01.3 | There would be no Seneca without Adelis, no Chrysippus without Cleanthes, and no Cleanthes without Zeno. |
| 2:08.9 | 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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