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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 your kingdom. Will you rule it? In the first century AD, few would have argued that epictetus was the most powerful person in Rome.

Few would have argued that this lowly slave possessed any power at all. And in fact, the name said it all.

Epictetus means acquired one. Yet what philosophy helped epictetus come to understand was that was actually a neuro and the other powerful men and women of the time who were the slaves.

They were the ones who had been acquired by ambition, by desire, by aversion, by insecurities, by money, by fame.

All of us were born with freedom of choice, but many of us relinquished this power in favor of much more superficial things.

In slavement, the horrible torture that epictetus underwent, the lifelong disability that followed it, none of this actually inhibited the inherent power that any of us have.

Did you injure your mind? The father says to young epictetus in the girl who would be free. No, epictetus replies, was your soul hurt? No again, was your sense of right and wrong affected? No.

Then I need you to focus more on who controls the empire between your ears comes the stoic wisdom, unless on what happened to your leg.

And later in the book, Marcus Aurelius tries to grant poor little epictetus any favor that they like, but there's nothing that King can possibly do.

Epictetus is already perfectly free and all powerful. Most of us are born into this world closer and status to epictetus than Marcus Aurelius.

We are more lowly than we are exalted, yet each of us, Asenica said, has access to the greatest empire ruling over ourselves.

Will we seize this kingdom, or will we trade it away for superficial, shiny things? Will we free ourselves through our freedom of choice, or will we hand that freedom over to the mob, to our urges, to our fears?

And that's the question of your life right there. Answer it. Right.

Actually, my fable about epictetus is life. The girl who would be free celebrates its first anniversary this month.

The girl who would be free, it follows my other book, The Boy Who Would Be King, about Marcus Aurelius.

And the idea is that I wanted to illustrate the incredible lives and the journeys of these two philosophers on their way to their own unique and inspiring greatness.

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