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Welcome to the Daily Stood Podcast, where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom

designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life.

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

of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us dailystood.com.

One way to go through life is to turn away from the things that are hard. You can close

your eyes and ears to what is unpleasant. You can take the easy way for going difficulty

whenever possible. The other way is the stoic way, which entails not only avoiding hardship,

but actively seeking it out.

In the novel memoirs of Hadrian, the author has Hadrian right to young Marcus Aurelius

about his philosophy for learning and benefiting from all life's adversity and unpleasantness.

Whenever an object repelled me, the author has Hadrian say, I made it a subject of study,

ingeniously compelling myself to extract from it a motive for enjoyment. If faced with

something unforeseen or near cause for despair, like an ambush or a storm at sea, after all

measures for the safety of others had been taken, I strove to welcome this hazard, to rejoice

in whatever it brought me of the new and unexpected, and thus without shock the ambush or the

tempest was incorporated into my plans or my thoughts. Even in the throes of my worst disaster,

I have seen a moment when sheer exhaustion reduced some part of the horror of the experience,

and when I made the defeat a thing of my own in being willing to accept it.

Of course this is fiction, so Hadrian never said such a thing, but clearly somebody at

some time taught Marcus a lesson along those lines, because meditations is filled with

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