The Daily Stoic - BONUS | You Can't Let The Setbacks Win

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

When jarred by circumstances, Marcus Aurelius writes, we have to revert back to ourselves. We have to come back to the rhythm. We have to intervene. We can't let the challenges win.Let’s not write the year off just yet. The Daily Stoic New Year New You challenge is opening back up for a limited time. Learn more and sign up today at dailystoic.com/challenge.👉 Get The Daily Stoic New Year New You & all other Daily Stoic courses for FREE when you join Daily Stoic Life | dailystoic.com/life🎥 Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 can't let the setbacks win. You had big plans. You had earnest intentions. You were really going to get after it. You were going to do things differently. It was going to be a dry January for you.

It was going to be a January filled with workouts and better eating. You were going to pick up your guitar. car again or finally quit smoking. What happened? You got sick. Your kids got sick. Work got crazy. You got distracted by the events in the news. And the result was you kept on being, as Marx really said, the person you've always been, even though you were being mauled and degraded by the life you were living. That's okay, right? It happens. Stoicism is not about perfection. Life is going to interrupt. Things are going to challenge us. Things are going to going to happen. We're not always going to follow through on what we said, but when that happens,

we can't just resign ourselves to our fate. We can't just accept mediocrity or monotony or settling because we got off track, right? When jarred by circumstances, Mark Surrealist writes, in meditations, we have to revert back to ourselves. We have to come back to the rhythm. We have to intervene. We can't let the challenges win. We have to challenge ourselves to get better. And by the way, I experienced as myself, as I said, the first two weeks of the year were crazy for us with the flu and strep throat and then the other strain of the flu. So we're going to be doing another session of the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge, right? The year got off to a rocky start.

Stuff happened that was outside your control, where you fell behind or whatever it was. Well, you can still revert back to yourself. You can take control. You can decide right now you're going to get back on track. You're going to stop waiting. You're going to make those changes. And that's what the Daily Stoic New Year, New You challenge is all about. It's designed to help you do precise.

that to push you, to challenge you, to help you do what you need to do. And if you want to do that with thousands of Stoics all over the world, myself included, I would love to have you in the Daily Stoic New Year, New Year, New You Challenge. You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com slash challenge. And if you join Daily Stoic Life, or if you are a daily Stoic life, remember, you get this challenge and all our challenges that we do throughout the year, plus our courses, plus a bunch of other awesome stuff, totally for free. So you can sign up there at Dailystoiclife.com just go to dailystoke.com slash challenge and I'll walk you all through it. I hope to see you in there.