The Daily Stoic - We Are Better Than Before | No Blame, Just Focus

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Before, you were scared. Before, you were soft. Before, you were dependent. Before, you were so many things.📔 Pick up your own leather bound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/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.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a stoic-inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStstoic.com. We are better than before. Before you were scared, before you were soft, before you were dependent, before you were so many things.

But after? After the breakup, after the bankruptcy, after the pandemic, after those rough couple years? Now you are capable of so much more. You are stronger, you are braver, you are more independent. Did you pick up a couple scars along the way? Was it painful and exhausting? Sure, of course, and you never would have chosen to go through it. But you did, and now you are better for it. Seneca had pity for people who'd never gone through things. It is good, he said, that we have been knocked around and bruised and bloodied in the ring. It has taught us what we are capable of.

It's made us capable of more. So the next time you are going through something hard, next time you feel like you have been beaten down, remember, this is where strength comes from. This is how we grow. This is how we become more than we were before. You are not just enduring, you are becoming. If you have a job you need filled fast,

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You must stop blaming God and not blame any person. You must completely control your desire and shift your avoidance to what lies within you, your reasoned choice. You must no longer feel anger, resentment, envy or regret. Epictetus' Discourses 322. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for resistance to the brutal apartheid regime in South Africa

for 27 years. For 18 of those years, he had a bucket for a toilet, a hard cot and a small cell. And once a year he was allowed a single visitor for 30 minutes. It was vicious treatment meant to isolate and break down the prisoners. And yet in spite of that, Mandela became a figure

of dignity within the prison. Though he was deprived of many things, he still found creative ways to assert his will. As one of his fellow prisoners, Neville Alexander, explained to Frontline, Mandela always made the point, if they say you must walk fast, insist on walking slowly. That was the whole point. We are going to set the terms. He pretended to jump rope in shadow box to stay in shape. He held his head higher than the other prisoners, encouraged them when times were tough, and always retained his sense of self-assurance.

That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choice. Ignore as best you can the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don't get emotional, get focused. What I always find so amazing about the stories of Nelson Mandela, Reuben Hurricane Carter, a Epictetus, a James Stockdale, is not only how they managed to comport themselves,

the dignity and poise and resistance and fortitude they underwent in the prison, which was incredible and feet of human survival. But as I get older and I've experienced things that I've been slighted or wronged, frustrated, I'm even more impressed with how they behaved after the forgiveness that they offered, the lack of resentment or bitterness that they carried,

the way they brought people together. They could have come out of the prison like Bane in Batman. It could have been the origin of a villain story. But it was the opposite of that. You think even Martin Luther King, you think of the horrible things in a way. You think of Gandhi. You think of how unjustly they were treated, how people

took things from them, years that they would never get back, time with their family they would never get back, broke down their bodies and the way that Epictetus experienced under torture or Stockdale experienced under torture. You think of John McCain not being able to lift his arm a certain way for the rest of his life. They were deprived of so much, but they chose not to see it that way. Hurricane Carter famously doesn't ask for reparations after he leaves prison. He doesn't even want to admit that that had been taken from him.

He was in control. And I just think of the incredible poise and strength and pride and all the stowed virtues. And I'm putting pride in there deliberately, like their carriage, their, this is who I am, you cannot break me. I decide. That to me is just the essence of Stoicism.

I hope none of us are ever tested in such a way, and I hope Stocktas is the only one who tests Epictetus' theories in the modern world, in the laboratory, so to speak, at that level. But each of us, if we have a period in a marriage, or we have a bad boss, or maybe is how you think about the pandemic. We have these periods of our life where we were subjected to something that we didn't like. And we could be angry about it. We could sow division afterwards about it. We could get even for it. But instead, we focus on our reason choice. We focus on being afterwards about it. We could get even for it, but instead we focus on our reason choice.

We focus on being good and decent. We don't hang on to anger or resentment or envy or regret, as Epictetus says, but we maintain that dignity. We don't perpetuate the same injustices that were perpetuated upon us. And we show, as Mark Sturule says, that the best revenge is to not be like that, to be better, to make a better world where hopefully something like what we just went through doesn't happen again, or at the very least,

doesn't happen because of anything that we say or do. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple years we've been doing it. It's an honor.

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