You Must Meet It All the Same

"We have good days. We have bad days. We will have, as Seneca experiences, moments of heartbreak and bad luck as well as strokes of good fortune and good timing. The question is how we’re going to respond to these swings of fate..."Ryan uses a poem by Rudyard Kipling to explain the poise with which we should all meet fate, 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.

• 0:29Ryan Holiday?

  You must meet it all the same. We have good days, we have bad days. We will have, as Seneca experienced, moments of heartbreak and bad luck, as well as strokes of good fortune and good timing. The question is how we're going to respond to these swings of fate, if we can follow the lines of Kipling's classic poem "If." If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. Remember that Marcus Aurelius commanded himself to accept it without arrogance and let it go with indifference. Like Kipling, he saw success and failure as meaningless, as imposters. "A rock thrown in the air gains nothing by going up," he said, "and nothing by falling down. What matters is who we are.

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  What matters is the character we live by. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue," Kipling writes, "or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch. If you can greet anything and everything that life throws at you, if you can be brave and calm and collected and disciplined, no matter what happens, then you are a true Stoic." 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.