Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast. On Friday, we do double duty, not just reading our

daily meditation, but also reading a passage from the Daily Stoic. My book, 366 Meditations

on Wisdom, Perseverance in the Art of Living, which I wrote with my wonderful collaborator,

translator, and literary agent, Stephen Hanselman. So today, we'll give you a quick meditation

from the Stoics with some analysis from me, and then we'll send you out into the world

to turn these words into works.

You have to know where you're going. We know we want to go somewhere, we want to do

something, we want to be successful, we want to win, we know we want to start something

with it, it's a company or a creative project or a movement. Perhaps we want justice,

we want someone to make things right, we want to change, we want to grow, we want to

prove people wrong about us, we want to be happy. But what exactly, or how, what exactly

does that success look like? What is this happiness we speak of? Well, there we have a lot

less clarity. Law 29 of the 48 laws of power in the great Robert Green is plan all the

way to the end. By the way, he and I are doing some talks together. I'll tell you about

that at the end. In the law, he says, by planning all the way to the end, you will not be

overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop. Gently guide fortune and

help determine the future by thinking far ahead.

Seneca actually said something similar many centuries earlier. He said, if you don't know

what port you're sailing to, no wind is favorable. Having an end in mind is no guarantee that

you'll reach it. No stoic would pretend otherwise, but not having an end in mind is a

guarantee that you won't reach it. Having conflicting goals, vague hopes, half-baked schemes,

this is to set yourself up for failure for overreach for getting lost. To the stoics,

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