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, visit DailyStoic.com. Take this seriously. After seven years in a Vietnamese prison camp, Admiral James Stockdale was thinking about taking his study of stoicism, the philosophy he credited with helping him survive those horrific years, even more seriously. He wasn't exactly sure what that might

look like in practice, though. We write more about it, read more about it, apply practices like

the dichotomy of control more? Again, he wasn't exactly sure. At a conference not long after

he returned home, Stockdale met the great philosopher Will Durant and brought up his

interest in Stoicism. Durant wasn't much help as far as clarifying what the next step might be,

but he shared Stockdale's interest and pointed him to a passage in his book, Life of Greece.

Stoicism was a noble philosophy, it said, and proved more practical than a modern cynic would expect. It brought together all the

elements of Greek thought, and though it naturally won only a small minority to its standards,

those few were everywhere the best. Like its Christian counterparts, Calvinism, and Puritanism,

it produced the strongest characters of its time.

Theoretically, it was a monstrous doctrine of an isolated and pitiless perfectionism.

Actually, it created men of courage and saintliness and goodwill, like Marcus Aurelius,

Epictetus, Cato the Younger. That's what Stoicism has done throughout history. It has made people the best they could be. It's produced some of the strongest characters of all time. Certainly that's what

it had already done for Stockdale, and yet there he was, like Marcus Aurelius, who's famously seen

heading off to philosophy lectures even as an old man, remaining a student and still

getting better as he went. And that's what it can do for you if you take it seriously. But maybe you,

like me, like Stockdale, are always wondering about what that next step is, how to continue your

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