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.

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The choice is clear, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

He desperately needed the help.

He desperately needed the money.

Ulysses S. Grant was at rock bottom.

Personally, financially, he had just pawned his watch to pay for his children's Christmas

presents. He had acres and acres of forest he needed to clear if he was going to claw a living

for himself off the land. Yet in 1859, as I tell the story and right thing right now, Ulysses

S. Grant walked into a courthouse to free a slave named William Jones

that he and his wife had been given by their father-in-law.

Slavery was wrong, and he wanted no part in it.

Just that you do the right thing, Marxus Reelius writes in meditations,

the rest doesn't matter. But just because they don't matter

doesn't mean they're painless. The choice was clear for Grant, but that didn't eliminate the

consequences. It didn't lessen the load he had to bear. When it comes to doing what's right,

the timing is rarely perfect.

The bills are always due, the pressures always mounting, the sacrifice is always painful.

...