This Can Change the Course of Your Life

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. The right book at the right time is a powerful thing. In fact, it can change the whole course of your life. Sometime in the first century AD, a young Marcus Aurelius was given a copy of Epictetus's lectures from his teacher's own library.

Walking the halls one day as a grad student at Stanford a professor invited James Stockdale into his office. Reaching behind him, he too grabbed a worn copy of Epictetus off the shelf and handed it to this promising young man. Not only did these books change the lives of the people they were given to, Marcus Aurelius relying on it when he became emperor and Stockdale as a prisoner of war, but it may have indirectly changed your life too. How many people heard about the Stoics from these two evangelists? How many people has their example inspired?

And there's actually another impressionable kid whose life was changed by such a recommendation. Who? Who you might ask? Me. When I first picked up Meditations 18 years ago, I had no idea how much that book would impact my life.

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