Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues,

courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

You're never going to be perfect. We have goals. We have standards. We have what we know we need to do. And then

discipline. That key stoic virtue determines whether we do it or not. The problem is that some

people seem to think that this discipline must be ironclad, and then they beat themselves when they

fall short. The stoics had high standards. They had important jobs.

They had a lot they needed to do.

They also understood that perfection was not possible.

What was possible, Epictetus said, was striving to be better.

What mattered, Mark Shrio said, was how quickly you picked yourself up after you were jarred by circumstances. Sometimes we'll fall short.

Sometimes we'll have to make an exception. Sometimes we're just plain forget our training and our

standards. But it's like that famous line in Steinbeck's east of Eden, which has a bunch of Stoic

games, actually opened the Four Virtue series with a line from that.

Adam Trask in the book, the character, he's been impossibly hard on himself.

He's racked with guilt and he's told by the family servant Lee.

And now that you know you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.

And that's the point.

We don't have to be perfect.

We just have to choose to be good.

We have that choice.

We can begin again.

We can still fight through it.

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