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Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic. My book, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Heart of Livin,

which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator, translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman.

So today, we'll give you a quick meditation from the Stoics with some analysis from me,

and then we'll send you out into the world to turn these words into works.

Ty, you're well-being to this. Today, we know F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of the great novelists of the 20th century.

Tragedically, though, in his own time, many regarded Fitzgerald as a failure. Sure, he was one of the highest paid writers of his time,

but his novels sold poorly, and the critical reviews were precisely that. They were critical.

And this weighed heavily on Fitzgerald, who had a sensitive and vulnerable soul as many great artists do.

As Sarah Churchwell, an expert on 20th and 21st century American lit, and the author of one of my favorite books,

Careless People, Murder, Mayhem, and the invention of the Great Gatsby, explained here on a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast.

He pinned so much personal hope and ambition and desire and sense of his self-worth as an artist on Gatsby,

and its comparative failure devastated him. And in my view, it really precipitated his spiral.

With Gatsby, he made this choice that he was going to write a masterpiece, and then it was met with bafflement,

and that I think he lost a lot of his self-confidence and a lot of his momentum at that point.

Fitzgerald was really dogged by his inability to practice what Epictetus called the Chief Task in Life,

differentiating between what is in your control and what isn't.

And when things didn't go Fitzgerald's way, he had trouble coping.

And after the reception or lack thereof of the Great Gatsby, he began drinking more.

He had trouble focusing. He constantly battled thoughts of what will the critics think of this?

What will the public say about that? And this headspace made it hard to write.

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