Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

What a wonderful thing to measure.

What makes for a successful life?

How do we know whether we're doing it right,

whether we're winning, whether we're achieving? For someone like Marcus Aurelius, the most

powerful man in the world, there were countless metrics he could have chosen. Did he expand

the empire? Did he produce a great work of literature, pass on his genes, were more simply or more basically, did he enjoy

himself? Did he experience pleasure? We know he didn't care much for any of these things,

and there's an interesting passage late in book five that gives us a sense of how he measured

his life. Consider all that you've gone through, all that you've survived, he writes, and that the story of your life is done, your assignment complete.

What matters? He asks, what should he be proud of? It's not pleasure or achievement, that's for sure, because he specifically congratulates himself for temptations that he resisted and honors that he turned down. Instead, he

puts forward a different metric. How many unkind people have you been kind to? What a wonderful

thing to measure. Life is full of jerks. It's full of people who put achievement and pleasure

above everything else.

Not only do we have to not do that, but we should pride ourselves on our patience and tolerance.

We should pride ourselves on our ability to put up with these people, to be able to be nice to people who are not nice,

to be able to turn the other cheek and not be made bitter or cynical.

The world has enough of those folks, has enough

unkindness. Let's not add to it.

We are just getting back from a trip so the fridge is empty and we're like, oh man, we've got to go the store. We're going to have for dinner tonight. And then I realized, no, no, so the fridge is empty, and we were like, oh, man, we got to go to the store,

we're going to have for dinner tonight. And then I realized, no, no, no, wait, Hello Fresh just came. So we took the Hello Fresh meals out, and we got to work. We love Hello Fresh in our household, because the meals are simple. You can make them on a busy work night. You can do it on the weekend. you can do it when you get to the end of your groceries.

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