It Can Change Everything | A Real-Life Example of How to Build a Coaching Tree

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. It can change everything. The right thing at the right time can change everything. Zeno discovered Xenophon's writings on Socrates in Athens and went on to found the Stoic School of Philosophy. I was just there.

This summer, the Stoopochilae, is where it all began. A young Marcus Aurelius was given a copy of Epictetus's lectures from his teacher's personal library and relied on that book for the rest of his life, even as emperor. James Stockdale was handed the same works by a professor at Stanford, and he'd used what he'd learned to survive seven years as a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton. Aunt Tracy gave me a copy of Man's Search for Meaning when I graduated from high school, which, in retrospect, set me up perfectly a few years later, when I was turned on to the Stoics. I've been raving about the novels and writings of James Salter lately.

If you haven't read his book, The Hunters, it's great, so is his memoir Burning the Days. But he has this great passage in his novel Light Years. He says The book was in her lap, and she read no further. The power to change one's life comes from a paragraph. Alone remark, the lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers.

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