BONUS | 3 Stoic One-Liners You Need Today

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Three life-changing one-liners from the ancient. Seneca said, he who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary. He's talking about catastrophizing, he's talking about anxiety, he's talking about worrying, he's talking about dreading all the things that could happen. When you punish yourselves in anticipation of what might happen, you are ultimately adding to your total suffering.

And we should remember most of the things we worry about, most of the things we dread, most of the things we anticipate never actually end up happening. Number two, this is the famous line from Marcus Aurelius. that the obstacle is the way. He says the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

We don't control what happens, the Stoics say. We control how we respond to what happens. We want to see this thing, this obstacle, this difficulty, this pain point, not as something negative that's happening to us, but as something that's happening for us, that is an opportunity for us to practice virtue, that is an opportunity for us to be the person that we are capable of being. Number three from Epictetus, he says, remember it is impossible to learn that which you think you already know. This is why ego is the enemy.

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