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Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics illustrated with stories from history,

the 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.

Why are you surprised? In June 2001, Paul Wolfowitz, then the US Deputy Secretary of Defense, addressed the cadets at West Point.

While the speech he gave was not itself a historical moment, one remark in it would go down in history, because it was one of those quotes that history would in retrospect make particularly poignant, if not outright, ironic.

Surprise happens so often, Wolfowitz said that it's surprising, we're still surprised by it. It was time he said for leaders and soldiers and citizens alike to replace a poverty of expectations within anticipation of the unfamiliar and the unlikely.

Just three months later, Wolfowitz and most, if not all, of the US government would be stunned when Jihadists crashed two planes into the World Trade Center and won into the Pentagon.

Wolfowitz himself would come to call the events of 9-11, awake up call, and thus illustrate a timeless piece of Stoic wisdom, that saying and knowing are not the same thing, that it's incredibly easy tempting even to pay lip service to an idea without being fully able to integrate it into your life and your profession.

Remember when Senaqa said the only unforgivable excuse is I did not think it would happen, we can nod our head at that, we can acknowledge how right it is, but it matters very little if you do not also, as Epictita said, embody that philosophy.

Look at where we are right now, plenty of people warned about the risk of pandemics, plenty of smart people noted that a decade-long bull market could not last, plenty of people spelled out the worst-case scenarios that accompany cronism, egotistical leaders and political polarization.

My Gluas wrote an entire book titled The Fifth Risk about what happens when governmental bureaucracies are allowed to operate understaffed without clear priorities or accountability.

Senaqa asked you to do a pre-meditatio malorum, maybe you even carry a coin reminding you of that in your pocket, and yet here we are, surprised, unprepared, disappointed.

We knew, but we did not know, we talked about it, but we did not live it, so that is on us, but it never happened again.

What little winds can you find? Zeno, the Phoenician merchant who founded the Stoic School on the painted porch, the Stoic Poquille of the Aguara after a shipwreck, said that happiness was a matter of small steps.

While the Stoics believed in the perfect ability of human beings, they knew that so much stood in the way of realizing that potential.

So they would be skeptical of the so-called epic winds and quantum leaps that our culture obsesses over today.

Instead they would urge you to focus on your daily duties on making incremental progress.

Spend your time this week thinking about small winds.

What little gains can be had from this improvement or that one? A decision here or a decision there?

Be satisfied with each small step. Keep moving and don't give up.

This is from this week's entry in the Daily Stoke Journal, 366 days of writing and reflection on the art of living from yours.

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