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Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. On Thursdays, we do double duty not just reading our daily meditation,

but also reading a passage from the book The Daily Stoke, 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living, which I wrote my wonderful co-author and collaborator Steve Enhancelman.

And so today, we'll give you a quick meditation from one of the stoics from Epititus Markis Relius, Seneca, and some analysis for me, and then we send you out into the world to do your best to turn these words into works.

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You'll never get your pound of flesh. They screwed you over. Her your career. They disrespected you. They blew it. They didn't. Whatever. Now you want your revenge.

You want them to suffer as you suffer. You want them to know to feel the same thing that you're feeling. Stoke's talk about justice. So that's okay, right?

It shouldn't be able to get away with this. Remember in the year 175, Marcus Aurelius was betrayed by his most trusted general, a videos casious and an attempted coup.

Marcus could have been angry. He could have demanded all the sadistic revenge possible for a man with his unlimited power. Yet we know from the historians that he handled even this moment with grace and understanding.

In fact, he wept when he was deprived of the chance to grant clemency to his former enemy. The best revenge Marcus would write in meditations is to not be like that.

When he found himself getting pissed off by something someone had done, he urged himself to think about the wrong that he himself had done to others at other times.

He tried to practice forgiveness and when that was beyond him, at least in difference or tolerance.

We have to accept that we cannot get even that it's an extra injury to ourselves to lower ourselves to the kind of cruelty or stupidity of our opponents.

They may steal from us, but we ought not steal time from ourselves stealing from them or worse. There is no pound of flesh that will make us feel better. Only we can make ourselves feel good again by focusing on what we have to be grateful for by being good to others and by moving on.

Living without restriction. The unrestricted person who has in hand what they will and all events is free, but anyone who can be restricted, coerced or pushed into something against what they will is a slave.

Epicetus' discourses. 4-1

Take a look at some of the most powerful rich and famous people in the world, ignore the trappings of their success and what they are able to buy, look instead at what their forced trade-in return, look at what success has cost them.

Mostly freedom. Their work demands that they wear a suit, their success depends on attending certain parties, kissing up to people they don't like. It will require inevitably realizing that they are unable to say what they actually think.

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