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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 DailyStoic.com.

What other people get away with is not an excuse. Let us stipulate first that Serena Williams is an extremely talented tennis player and an honest and ethical person.

Let us also stipulate that she has been unfairly treated by chair and line-up buyers, not just when she was an up-and-comer, but also inexplicably now that she is one of the greatest players in the game.

And yet, even stipulating all this, as well as recognition of the fact that the passion which drives athletes is a potent force that amateurs and spectators can never fully appreciate, her controversial behavior at the US Open earlier this year

provides an interesting lesson to chew on. There is no need to repeat what has been extensively reported elsewhere so we can just summarize.

Serena Williams was having a tough match in the US Open finals with Naomi Osaka. She disputed a coaching call with the chair umpire, believing that she was not being illegally coached from the stands, and that a warning should have been issued first if she had been.

Upset over this call, which implied she was a cheater, Serena ended up smashing her racket and frustration over another call a few games later.

Not tolerating the jabs at her character, she continued to jaw at the referee, accusing him of stealing a point from her and demanding an apology.

She lost her composure and also ended up losing the match.

Again, while none of this is particularly stoic, it is completely understandable. What was less understandable from a stoic perspective was the argument made by supporters and Serena herself explaining the events that had just transpired on the court.

Their point was that male tennis players regularly get away with similar behavior. There are some data on this that you can look at in the New York Times.

So therefore, an injustice had been committed in Serena not being able to release her frustrations as well. Some even considered her a hero in this drama for asserting herself with the chair umpire and then with the WTA during the press conference, like the bad boys of tennis used to.

But to ask whether Serena's gender affected her treatment is from a stoic perspective to ask the wrong question as Martina Navar-Talova wrote in a New York Times op ed.

It is difficult to know and debatable whether Miss Williams could have gotten away with calling the empire a thief if she were a male player.

But to focus on that, I think is missing the point. If in fact the guys were treated with a different measuring stick for the same transgressions,

this needs to be thoroughly examined and must be fixed. But we cannot measure ourselves by what we think we should also be able to get away with.

In fact, this is the sort of behavior that no one should be engaging in on the court. There have been many times that when I was playing that I wanted to break my racket into a thousand pieces,

then I thought about the kids watching and I grudgingly held on to that racket. Important cultural and political issues of fairness obviously matter at the larger level, particularly for activists and lawmakers.

However, at the individual level, the question we must always ask of ourselves is never is there a double standard, but what standard will I hold myself to?

For the same reason as we make choices, the idea of whether something is illegal is also a poor metric. A stoke should only care about whether something is right.

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