Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast.

Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic's 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 Stoic

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.

Wait for it to settle.

In the demands of daily life in the immediacy of a heightened moment in the pincering crush

of competing interests, we rarely make good decisions.

Whether it's because we don't have all the information or we are biased by impressions

or we are blinded by emotions, it doesn't really matter.

What matters is the virtuousness of the decisions that we make.

In one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's best short stories, the four fists, he talks about a man

who is infatuated with a married woman.

For the next week Samuel was in a nervous turmoil Fitzgerald, right?

Some persistently rational strain warned him that at the bottom he and Marjorie had little

in common, but in such cases there is usually so much mud in the water that one can sell

them see the bottom.

Missled by his impulses, the clarity would in this case only come later in the shock of

a fist to the face from the woman's husband.

As it happens this metaphor of muddy water was used by both the Buddhists and the Stoics.

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