Excellence Is Not an Act, But a Habit

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Erit, that's a powerful word. To the Greeks it meant excellence. It was the ultimate expression of human greatness, moral, physical, spiritual. It's what the Stoics were chasing.

it's what you're chasing today. But how do we get there? Well, erete requires a certain philosophical approach, because brilliance and inspiration and skill are not enough. We are what we repeatedly do, Aristotle said, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.

In other words, excellence isn't this thing you do one time. It's a way of living. It's foundational. It's like an operating system, and the code this system operates on is habit. As Epictetus would later say, capability is confirmed and grows in its corresponding actions, walking by walking and running by running.

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