The Daily Stoic - The One Thing In Your Life You Can Control
Episode Date: August 6, 2025Our lives are unpredictable. We are at the mercy of so many forces.📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/p...ages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.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.
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation
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Our lives are unpredictable. We are at the mercy of so many forces, the weather, the economy, your boss's mood, your teenager's mood, whether the contractor finishes the job in time, whether that idiot in front of you drives right. They can mess up our day, they can mess up our margins, they can imperil our safety. It has always been thus. Marcus Aurelius opens book two of meditations with a meditation on precisely this, preparing himself in the morning for what he's likely to encounter.
He didn't control other people or external events, he understood,
but he did control whether he allowed them to change who he was,
whether he allowed them to implicate him in ugliness, as he put it.
He controlled how he responded.
It's not much, but then again, it's plenty.
The paradox is that the more we control ourselves,
the more we end up shaping the world around us.
That's why when we focus on what's in our control,
on what's up to us, we find that it's more than enough.
Not only does it become our hidden superpower, it is also our secret source of peace.