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Welcome to the Daily Stood 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 at DailyStood.com.

There are only hard decisions.

Wouldn't it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That's what we'd like to think the job of a leader is.

You become president or emperor and now that you're in charge things can finally be cleaned up. Just bring me the decisions you think and I'll do a much better job than those fools who came before me.

Of course, life isn't remotely like that. Observers of the presidency have observed that only the impossible problems make their way to the Oval Office.

Everything that's clean and easy, that gets decided much lower down in the chain of command. It's the intractable no-win situations that get escalated to the leader's desk.

Certainly that's what Marcus Aurelius dealt with. Wars at foreign borders, a bankrupt treasury, a plague, religious strife, all the fun stuff, all the obvious stuff, other people got to deal with that.

Everything else fell on his shoulders. Nobody else was asked to tutor Nero because no one else was up to the task. It fell on Senaqa to weigh that awful dilemma, especially as Nero grew older and harder and harder to manage.

It might seem like an easy decision to us in retrospect, but that's because the decision was never offered to us.

We have never had to actually consider what Rome would have looked like if someone worse had been Nero's advisor, we've never had to face that level of no-win situation.

The point is, leadership like life is often a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils. It's about making the best of bad situations. It's about being pragmatic and realistic.

We can't go through life expecting it to be like Plato's Republic Marcus Aurelius reminds us, we don't live there. We live in the real world where there are only hard decisions where the easy simple problems get greedily gobbled up by lesser men and women. It's the tough stuff that falls on us. That's okay. We're ready for it.

Thanks for listening to the Daily Stood Podcast. If you didn't know, I also have another podcast and Daily Email. Every day I write something at DailyDad.com, which gets delivered to thousands of people all over the world, I record the meditations just like this one on the podcast for free.

So if you're a parent, if you know a parent, if you're an expecting parent, I think you'd really like it. It's called DailyDad, but has nothing to do with gender. I'm a dad. That's why it's called that. We'd love to have you over at DailyDad.com. And of course, subscribe to the DailyDad Podcast.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.

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