Welcome to the Daily Stoeck 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 2000 year old philosophy that has guided some

of history's greatest men and women.

For more, you can visit us dailystoeck.com.

You took the job. The Emperor Hadrian's life sometimes felt as it does for all leaders,

like an endless demand for favors. Letters came from across the empire asking for this,

and that the Senate, the courts, his own family, everybody always seemed to need something.

Naturally, he struggled under this burden. Naturally, he tried to create barriers and boundaries,

so he could do his job and maintain some level of sanity amidst all the requests.

Once on an imperial tour in some distant province, a woman darted out from the crowd and

blocked his path, asking for help with some now forgotten issue. Hadrian tried to put her off.

I haven't got the time, he said, attempting to move past her.

We'll stop being emperor than the woman shouted after him. Hadrian paused, turned back,

and helped her. She was right, this was his job after all, and it can be so easy to forget this,

to feel imposed on, even resentful of it. But guess what? You did take the job. You get the perks,

you don't get to shirk the responsibilities. Mark is really sometimes struggled in the mornings,

as we've written. He wanted to stay under the warm covers. He did not want to rise up and tackle

the overwhelming correspondence and meetings and demands that awaited him. But he talked himself

through it. He reminded himself that that was the job, that that was what duty and nature demanded

of him. And so must we. This is the kind of leadership that I am trying to work on myself.

It's one of the things we talk about in the Daily Stoke Leadership Challenge. I think

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