Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visitdailystoic.com.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day here in America.

And it's worth taking a minute today to consider one particularly brilliant and inspiring part from King's approach to civil rights.

What Martin Luther King didn't do in the 1950s and 1960s was simply point out how hypocritical and flawed the United States was. He didn't use

his immense skills as an order to paint a depressing, bleak picture of the racial state of affairs.

On the contrary, what MLK did was work hard to capture the true essence

of what America was supposed to be. He picked up all the central beliefs of the founding fathers,

justice, freedom, equality, and then he said, we can live up to this. We can do this together.

We are capable of better. Of course,

America did not hear this message immediately. In fact, huge swaths of the population did not want to hear it at all. So King and his followers showed them. They took to the streets and through the new

medium of television made it undeniable just how

far short America had fallen from its ideals, how disgusting and disturbing segregation and

racism were. Faced with this appalling spectacle, the country worked little by little to reach

for that higher standard he set for us, to fulfill the vision of what the

country was intended to be. It should be said that the Stoics follow a similar tact. Unlike

some philosophies and religions which use their logic and intellect to make life seem meaningless

and small, the Stoics sought to inspire the individual to reach their full human

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