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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day 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 dailystod.com.

It's success making you better or worse.

Success made Marcus a really better. It seems to have made Santa Cahorse.

Marcus who turned a philosophy in his 20s was suddenly made emperor at age 40. Despite the trueism that absolute power corrupts absolutely, he somehow managed to not only maintain his philosophical principles from the throne but seems to have taken the opportunity to become better,

kinder, more reflective, more generous, more open-minded, longer he was in power. Santa Cah who was tutored in stosism from a very early age had a promising career as a lawyer and then as a senator before two exiles.

One for health reasons and the other for trumped up charges. And these exiles derailed everything. He finally got the success he craved later in life when he was called back by Nero's mother to tutor her son.

Santa Cah became extremely powerful through this position but it came in a high cost. He turned a blind eye to Nero's excesses and may have been complicit in his monstrous crimes.

He became preposterously rich far beyond what any philosopher needed and when Nero truly broke bad, Santa Cah did little to stop us.

These two examples posed to us as history has always posed an essential question, will success make us better or worse, will getting everything we wanted to confirm our virtues or allow our vices to flourish?

Success should as it did for Marcus make us nicer, make us more empathetic, make us more principled. It should not as it did for Santa Cah demand compromises that we would have previously found a porant.

It should not cause us to forget our friends and fall short of our ideals. It should be an opportunity to grow not an excuse to regress or at least be just as bad as our newfound peers.

Robert Carro the biographer has disputed the idea that power has to corrupt. Instead he said it's more apt to reveal. It shows who we actually are.

It proves the idea of the Stokes believed that character is fate, who we are determines what we'll do with success or failure.

So that's the real question then, who are you at your core, will we like what this success you crave will reveal? Will you?

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