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 in to works.

It's just not true.

It's just not true. The Stoics were not magically stronger or wiser or more mentally

tough than you. In fact, they were exactly the same as you. They felt fear, they felt

frustration, they felt annoyance, they had expectations, they had desires.

And when things didn't work out for them, they got upset.

But it's what happened next that separates them from us.

The one habit that Epictetus and Marxists

and Seneca, a slave, an emperor, a power broker, and a playwright, respectively,

it was journaling. Epictetus said that philosophy was something his student should write down day by day and that this writing was

how they should exercise themselves. Seneca said the key was to put each day up

for review to go back over what I've said and done hiding nothing from myself he said passing

nothing by and Marx's realist of course said less on the subject of journaling but

left us the greatest lesson of all his. They were of course not the only ones to practice the habit of writing.

Foucault observed that in this era of history all the great minds practiced it. In this period he said there was a culture of what could be

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