This Will Define Your Legacy | Forgive Them Because They Don't Know

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. This will define your legacy. It doesn't seem like a moral question, it seems more like a personal choice, how you spend your money, whether you save or invest or spend or enjoy, how you spend your time, whether you fritter it away or you spend it on pursuits and people most important to you, whether you're stoic or epicurean. But discipline, temperance, the Stoics believed, was a virtue for a reason. We've been talking about the Founding Fathers a lot here for the 250th.

anniversary of America, and you can see as you contrast the founders just how important this virtue is. Both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington profited from slavery, and both knew it was wrong. Yet at the end of their lives it was Washington who freed his slaves, not Jefferson, even though Jefferson had written far more eloquently about human equality as well as the eternal shame of slavery. Why is this? Well it's

partly because Washington far more disciplined and stoic could afford to manument his slaves. Early on he hadn't been able to afford to run Mount Vernon without them, but he was secure enough at the end of his life to do what he obviously should have done, what his conscience knew he should have done years earlier. Jefferson, the Epicurean, was more than $100,000 in debt when he died. He had ransacked Europe for antiques and finery. He had expanded his estate multiple times, sparing no expense.

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