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. The most critical and rarest ability in life.

Everything we need to do draws on the same ability.

Every problem we face, every decision we make, every risk we take, every belief we choose to accept or question,

it all requires the skill of discernment.

Life, business, ethics, success, it all comes down to being able to see what is what in a given

situation, what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. And no skill was more cultivated than this by the Stoics. Epictetus talked of

money changers who could tell just by banging a coin on the table, whether it was counterfeit or not.

This, he said, was what a good philosopher had to be able to do, to know the right impression

from the wrong one, a good response from a bad one, a virtue

from a vice. This is what Seneca was doing in his evening reviews. It was what Marcus Aurelius

was trained in by Rousticus and Fronto and Antoninus. To be able to see what's in front of you

with clarity, to know what's important and what isn't,

how things work. That's what wisdom is. It's not an encyclopedic knowledge of facts and

figures, but something both profound and applied, for it was not Gandhi's sharp legal mind that made

him the Mahatma. No one is born with this critical and all too rare ability.

It is not something Seneca reminds us that can be delegated to someone else. There is no technology

that can do it for you. There is no app. No teacher who can simply download everything into

...