Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. Each day we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics,

illustrated with stories from history, 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.

You can do better now. The business failure, that blown meeting, the marriage that fell apart, those things that didn't go the way you wanted. It's frustrating and it's painful. It's hard to see

anything good about it. Surely that's what Hemingway felt when, as we talked about

recently, his entire literary output was lost in one unfortunate incident.

Don't tell me this is good, he wrote to Ezra Pound.

I ain't yet reached the mood.

We can imagine, in fact, we know Marcus Realist felt similarly about the devastating moments in his own life.

It's unfortunate that this happened, Marcus writes in one of the passages and meditations.

Rights in one of the passages and meditations.

He was pitying himself.

He was pissed off, but then he corrected himself.

No, it's unfortunate, he said, and I've remained unharmed by it, not shattered by the present or frightened of the future.

Could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have remained unharmed by it.

Hemingway eventually got in that mood. He started with a clean slate. He started

writing again. Within weeks he was back to fresh material, confident he was heading in a better

direction. Later he would even fictionalize the experience,

putting to paper a character who had lost all his work.

...