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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength,

insight, wisdom necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the

2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at DailyStoke.com.

It was almost 250 years ago, exactly. One of the darkest times in the American Revolution.

Christmas was here. George Washington was planning to cross the Delaware at desperate move necessitated by a stream of setbacks

and ebbing support for the revolution across the struggling country. Whose fault was this disaster? How had things gone so poorly?

Washington wasn't interested in those questions. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Morris, it is headquarters that day,

it is vain to ruminate upon or even reflect upon the authors or causes of our present misfortunes.

Instead of looking backwards, Washington said, we should rather exert ourselves, meaning they should focus on how they were going to respond.

His response was a daring attack on the Hessian troops in Trenton the next day, which may well have saved his army in the floundering nation.

And this mindset is part and parcel of the stoicism that Washington had known and followed all of his life.

It was about looking at events in the calm light of mild philosophy, as he liked to quote from the stoic philosopher Cato,

deciding not to be ruled by his impressions and instead focusing on what he do next.

And that's what we should take a minute to think about this Christmas of all Christmases, whether we're busy working or whether we've managed to safely see our families or whether we're planning out how we're going to have a better 2021 because frankly,

probably can't be worse than 2020. We can't focus on what caused our troubles, not who authored them, not how much blame they deserve, not how this could have been avoided.

Those questions are irrelevant distractions right now, answering them and exercise done only in vain.

What matters is how we plan to exert ourselves, how we plan to fix our situation, how we plan to respond to what life has thrown at us.

Whether it's a passive, aggressive friend, an industry ravaged by the pandemic or a series of bad personal choices, we have the power to decide what we're going to do next.

We can exert ourselves, we can still turn this around. All that matters is our response.

I do invite you to join our new year, new year challenge that we're doing here at Daily Stoke. If think it's our best one, I'm really excited about it.

I hope you have a great Christmas. I hope you're taking some time yourself, but I hope you're getting ready for what can be what must be a better 2021. That's why we made these challenges.

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