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Welcome to the Daily Stoke Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stokes illustrated with stories from history,

current events and literature to help you be better at what you do.

And at the beginning of the week we try to do a deeper dive, setting a kind of stoke, intention for the week,

something to meditate on, something to think on, something to leave you with, to journal about whatever it is you happen to be doing.

So let's get into it.

This is a great pleasure. Of the four stoke virtues, Marks really says that justice was the most important. To him it was the source of all the other virtues.

After all, how impressive our courage or discipline if they're only used for self-interest, what good is wisdom if not put to use to make the world better.

Over and over and over again, the Stokes talk about community and partnership and fellowship and neighborliness and our relation to a larger whole.

If you remember one of Marcus really says epithets for himself was cooperative. And it's that belief, the mutual interdependence among everything in the universe that we are all one,

that inspired our sympathetic one here at Daily Stoke. And it's also what inspired us back in December to ask you all to contribute to our effort through give directly to raise money for families and poverty.

Thanks to the generosity of the Daily Stoke and daily dad communities, we raise more than $32,000 for families in a village in Rwanda.

Give directly field team ended up providing each family with about an $850 cash transfer, the equivalent of a year's worth of income for people who are used to surviving on less than two bucks a day.

They actually shot this really cool video from some of the residents showing showing the impact that the donations had on their lives.

My children used to work to school with no shoes. They only cost one dollar but we couldn't afford them.

When I now meet someone on the streets, they tell me how lives have changed completely. It is amazing.

I use the first payment for teller and listens. I'm living my dreams as we speak.

One resident didn't even have a place to stand when it rained. So with the money they bought materials to repair their home, another woman explained that with the money that we donated, she bought a sewing machine and took tailoring lessons for the first time her children got new clothes and shoes.

There's this phenomenon called the helpers high. And it's been found that when you give to others, your brains, pleasure and reward centers light up as if you were the recipient of the good deed, not the giver.

It's hard to watch this video or listen to these people who have been benefited by such a small amount of money without feeling that high, which is something we the Stoics should live for, as Seneca said.

We Stoics, he said, take pleasure in bestowing benefits even though they cost us labor provided that they lighten the labor of others.

Marcus really talked about not needing the third thing, not needing to be thanked for what happened because doing it was rewarding enough for us.

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