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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom and temperance.

And here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare.

We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school.

And we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey everyone, it's Ryan. We've got another special episode today. This is a continuation of an audiobook we sampled recently.

Plutarchs How to Be a Leader from Princeton University presses ancient wisdom series. This is a great book. It's written by Plutarch, but translated and introduced by Jeffrey Beniker,

the mentor media, hybrid audio and recorded books were generous enough to give us this audiobook sample. Plutarch is just, you know, the best that ever did it. He's influenced basically every leader and thinker from Napoleon to Alexander Hamilton to Marcus Aurelius.

In fact, Plutarchs nephew or grandson was Marx, really, his philosophy teacher, if you can believe that. Plutarch is talking nuts and bolts of leadership. And he himself was a leader in the Roman Empire.

So he knew what he was talking about. If you haven't read Plutarchs lives, I also recommend that you check that out.

But today we've got a great excerpt from his How to Be a Leader series. This is the essay to an uneducated leader is talking about the importance of why a leader has to pursue that stoke virtue of wisdom.

And again, you should really read all of Plutarchs. This new How to Be a Leader series is fantastic. The audiobook is what you're about to get a sample of right now.

A leader should do anything, but not everything. Now some people, such as Kato, involved themselves in every aspect of government, in the belief that good citizens, to the best of their ability, never abandon their concern and care for the state.

And people praise Apomenonus because he did not neglect his duty even when the Thebans appointed him to an insignificant office out of envy and to insult him.

On the contrary, he declared that not only does an office bring distinction to a man, but a man also brings distinction to an office.

Then he proceeded to transform that insignificant office into a great and respected honour, even though previously it had involved nothing more than overseeing the clearing of Dung and the diverting of water from the streets.

And no doubt even I myself provide a good laugh to people visiting our town when they see me out in public performing similar duties, as I often do.

But in this situation, Antistini's memorable remark comes to my aid. For when someone expressed surprise that he was personally carrying his salted fish through the marketplace he said,

Of course I am, since it's for me. Conversely, when people reproach me for being on the job while tiles are being measured or cement and stones are being delivered, I say to them, look, I'm not building these things for myself, but for my native city. And so it is with many other small projects.

People would be petty and parsimonious if they oversaw these projects for themselves and carried them out on their own behalf.

But when they undertake them as a public service on behalf of the city, they are not at all undignified.

Indeed the care and eagerness they devote to small matters becomes even more significant.

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