He desperately needed the help. He desperately needed the money.
Ulysses S. Grant was at rock bottom, financially, personally. He had just pawned his watch to pay for his children's Christmas presents. He had acres and acres of forest he needed to clear if he was going to claw a living for himself off the land.
Yet in 1859, as we tell the story in Right Thing, Right Now, he walked into a courthouse to free a slave named William Jones that they had been given by his wife's father. Slavery was wrong. He wanted no part in it.
"Just that you do the right thing," Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself in Meditations. "The rest doesn't matter." But just because they don't matter, doesn't mean they're painless. The choice was clear for Grant, but that didn't eliminate the consequences—it didn't lessen the load he had to bear.
When it comes to doing what's right, the timing is rarely perfect. The bills are always due, the pressures always mounting, the sacrifices always painful. Grant knew this. It's why he didn't wait for a more convenient season to free William Jones. He didn't weigh the pros and cons. He didn't calculate the cost-benefit analysis. He simply did what was right. Because the time to do the right thing is always now—no matter how inconvenient it may be personally.
When Ryan ran the original marathon route from Marathon to Athens in 90 degree-plus heat, he was testing Stoic philosophy in action. As Seneca taught, "We treat the body rigorously so that it will not be disobedient to the mind."
Three miles from Athens, hitting that wall every marathoner fears where your body urges you to give up, Ryan pushed through not for glory, but to prove he wasn't someone who quits when facing adversity.
Our Marathon documentary shows philosophy in practice—demonstrating the Stoic truth that challenging your body strengthens your mind. Head to dailystoic.com/marathon to watch and see what it truly means to put Stoic principles into practice.
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