This Is the Power You Have

"Life is hard. We face insurmountable odds with so many problems. We get bad news. We mess up. We find out that what we wanted—what we deserve, what is fair—is just not in the cards for us. Think about Pete Frates. In his late 20s, he was hit by a pitch in an amateur league baseball game. At the doctor, shortly thereafter, it was discovered that he had ALS. Talk about “crying, stung by bee.” A sports injury uncovered a terminal diagnosis."Find out what Frates did in response to his diagnosis, and how you can embody his spirit, on today's Daily Stoic Podcast.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to The Daily Stoic, where each day we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. This is the power you have. Life is hard. We face insurmountable odds with so many problems. We get bad news, we mess up, we find out that what we wanted, what we deserve, what is fair, is just not in the cards for us. Think about Pete Freitz. In his late twenties, he was hit by a pitch in an amateur league baseball game. At the doctor shortly thereafter,

• 0:50Ryan Holiday?

  it was discovered that he had ALS. Talk about crying stung by B, a sports injury uncovered a terminal diagnosis. That could have been the beginning of a sad story for Freitz, but it wasn't. Instead, he threw himself into raising money for ALS. "The man upstairs has a plan for me," he said. "This is the hand I've been dealt, and I've made my peace with it. There are people out there that don't have my support system or my advantages, and I want to help them." And he did. With the ALS Bucket Challenge, he helped raise over $200 million. Pete Freitz changed the trajectory of ALS forever and showed the world how to live with a fatal disease, the ALS Association has said. "Even when he was

• 1:32Ryan Holiday?

  paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, without the ability to talk, and having to be fed through a tube, he never stopped. Up until the end, he was not resigned. He fought, he helped, he made a difference. He did not give in to despair. He adapted and transformed his fate into something that mattered." His courage, his creativity, his commitment, it models exactly what Marcus Aurelius wrote about in Meditations. "Our inward power," he wrote, "when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces, to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims. As circumstances allow, it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms that which would have quenched

• 2:13Ryan Holiday?

  a lamp, what's thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it, and makes it burn higher." In December 2019, Pete Freitz passed away at the age of 34. His battle lasted eight years, but the fire he started will keep burning. Especially if you light a torch from it and use it to start your own. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning, you can sign up at dailystoic.com/email.