Do you think Marcus Aurelius liked getting up early? Do you think he liked being patient with people? Do you think he liked the strict standards—physical, moral, intellectual—that he held himself to?
Of course not!
We know he struggled to get out of bed early; he writes about it in Meditations. We know there were things he would have liked to say to people who were bothering him. Obviously it would have been easier, in many ways, to be more like his predecessors, who used their title and office to get away with whatever they wanted. It didn't matter who he was. It didn't matter how much money or power he had. How well steeped he was in philosophy or how long he'd practiced the habit. It was still tough…because tough things are tough.
But that's what philosophy is about, what discipline is as a virtue: Doing things you don't want to do. It's doing the harder thing instead of the easier thing. It's sticking with it when you want to quit. It's pushing through the resistance, it's not giving in to the excuses. It's fighting—as Marcus Aurelius tried to do—to be what philosophy hoped you would be, not what your tired, exhausted, or entitled self would like to be.
Discipline, as we've said, is doing it anyway. It is notdoing what you ought not to do. This is not always going to be fun. It's rarely going to be easy. But that's the virtue.
Maybe your New Year got off to a little bit of a rough start. Maybe you were sick, maybe the weather disrupted your plans, or maybe life just got in the way, and you're thinking it would be easy to just throw in the towel. And although you couldn't control any of what happened—you can control whether you get yourself back on track.
And that's what we're doing with the 2026 Daily Stoic New Year, New You Challenge. We ran it the first three weeks of the year with thousands of Stoics all over the world doing it together. It was awesome, but not everyone made it all the way through. Some people fell off, some people wished they'd done it but missed out. If you were one of those people, it's not too late—we're gonna give it another go. And we'd love to have you with us.
You can sign up right now at dailystoic.com/challenge. It's three weeks of Stoic-inspired challenges designed to make you better, designed to make you do some things that maybe you're not going to like doing, but you're going to like having done. That's what Stoicism is, that's what virtue is…it's not about how you feel in the moment, it's about how you feel after.
You'll walk away from the challenge knowing how to:
Build resilience by embracing discomfort
Find gratitude and meaning in adversity
Establish effective ways to respond to stress
Deepen your perspective on what truly matters
Become that best version of yourself
And there's not much time left, so join us right now at dailystoic.com/challenge while you still can. You can start this very minute, and I'd love to see you in there.
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