The Daily Stoic

The Daily Stoic

Two thousand years ago, a former slave stood in front of a group of students in a small room in Rome and said something that still lands like a punch today. "Some things are within our power," Epictetus told them, "while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing. Not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing."

That is it. That is the whole thing. Everything that followed in Stoic philosophy -- every meditation Marcus Aurelius scribbled in his tent during a military campaign, every letter Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius, every lecture Epictetus gave to his students -- was essentially an extended commentary on those two sentences. What is up to you, and what is not. Get this distinction right, and you can handle almost anything life throws at you. Get it wrong, and you will spend your life fighting battles you were never meant to win.

Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman took that foundational idea and turned it into something you can hold in your hands and open every morning. The Daily Stoic offers 366 meditations -- one for each day of the year, including the leap day -- drawn from the writings of the three great Stoic thinkers: Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who ruled the most powerful empire on Earth and still struggled with his own temper. Seneca, the playwright and advisor to Nero who had more money than he probably should have and wrote about it with uncomfortable honesty. And Epictetus, the former slave who never wrote a word himself but whose students captured his teachings so vividly that they have survived for two millennia.