It’s Never an Accident | Ask Daily Stoic

Ryan Holiday· Host0:00

Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. [gentle music] It's never an accident. It wasn't some freak of circumstances that allowed Marcus Aurelius to be great amid disaster and unbelievable power. Wasn't a coincidence that Cato was the last honest man in Rome, a brave and solitary figure standing against the tide. Wasn't an accident that earned Stockdale the Medal of Honor in the Hanoi Hilton that allowed him to ride out seven years in solitary confinement and torture. No, it wasn't. It was Epictetus who said that the whole point of philosophy was to be able to meet whatever life threw at you with, "This is what I trained for." And that is precisely what these men had done. In fact, Marcus Aurelius thanks Rusticus at the beginning of Meditations for teaching him that he needed to train and discipline his character. Cato, as we said, trained his whole life in how he dressed to what he ate, to how he spoke, for some future moment when he would need to stand up, defend the Roman Republic. And Stockdale? Stockdale liked to joke that his plebe year at the Naval Academy prepared him for torture in prison. And of course, his study of philosophy didn't hurt either, and neither did his training in the Navy's SERE program: survive, evade, resist, escape.