Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation

designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life.

Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of

history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example,

and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom.

For more, visit Dailystoic.com. You can't afford this. Look, maybe if you were more of a nobody, maybe if people weren't

counting on you. Maybe if you didn't have kids, maybe if the stakes were lower, maybe if you never

had to think about financial security or making payroll or what

kind of example you were set in. Maybe then you could afford to be a hothead. Maybe then you could be

easily triggered. Maybe you could be petty, hold grudges, indulge your passions. But right now,

these days, you absolutely cannot.

I shall do nothing in malice, Lincoln wrote in a letter during the Civil War.

What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.

By the way, Lincoln's a main character, actually the final character in wisdom takes work,

and you can pre-order the book right now, dailystoic.com slash pre-order.

We are not Lincoln, but what we do matters. People are looking to us. People are affected by the

decisions we make, which is why, like him, we need to be reminded, as Marcus Aurelius did remind

himself repeatedly in meditations, not to give in to our temper, not to lash out, to calm down,

not to turn everything in to something. When we react emotionally, we rarely make things better.

When we get angry, we almost always make things worse for ourselves and others. We make things

harder. We make the more tense.

We blind ourselves. We miss opportunities for connection, collaboration, and community.

...