You’re Never Going to Be Perfect | Ask Daily Stoic

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're never going to be perfect. We have goals, we have standards, we have what we know we need to do. And then discipline, that key Stoic virtue. determines whether we do it or not.

The problem is that some people seem to think that this discipline must be ironclad, and then they beat themselves when they fall short. The Stoics had high standards, they had important jobs, they had a lot they needed to do. They also understood that perfection was not possible. What was possible, Epictetus said, was striving to be better. What mattered, Marx really said, was how quickly you picked yourself up after you were jarred by circumstances.

Sometimes we'll fall short, sometimes we'll have to make an exception. Sometimes we'll just plain forget our training and our standards. But it's like that famous line in Steinbach's East of Eden, which has a bunch of stoic themes, actually opened the Four Virtues series. with a line from that. Adam Trask in in the book, the character, he he's been impossibly hard on himself.

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