The Daily Stoic - There Are Only Hard Decisions

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

“Wouldn’t it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That’s what we’d like to think the job of a leader is. You become president—or emperor—and now that you’re in charge, things can finally be cleaned up. Just bring me the decisions, you think, and I’ll do a much better job than those fools who came before me.”Ryan explains why we have to be prepared to make difficult decisions 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.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. on music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Daily Stowed Podcast where each day we bring you a passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength, insight, and wisdom every day life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's

greatest men and women. For more you can can visit us dailystowed.com. There are only hard decisions. Wouldn't it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That's what we'd like to think the job of a leader is. You become president or emperor, and now that you're in charge, things can finally be cleaned up. Just bring me the decisions you think and I'll do a much better job than those fools who came before me. Of course, life isn't remotely like that. Observers of the presidency have observed that only the impossible problems make their way to the Oval Office. Everything that's clean and easy, that gets decided much lower down in the chain of command. It's the intractable no-win situations that get escalated to the leader's desk. Certainly, that's what Marcus

are really as dealt with. Wars at foreign borders, a bankrupt treasury, a plague, religious strife, all the fun stuff, all the obvious stuff, other people got to deal with that. Everything else fell on his shoulders. Nobody else was asked to tutor Nero because no one else was up to the task. It fell on Sennaka to weigh that awful dilemma, especially as Nero grew older and harder and harder to manage. It might seem like an easy decision to us in retrospect, but that's because the decision was never offered to us. We have never had to actually consider what Rome would have looked like if someone worse had been Nero's advisor. We've never had to face that level of no-win situation.

The point is leadership like life is often a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils. It's about making the best of bad situations. It's about being pragmatic and realistic. We can't go through life expecting it to be like Plato's Republic Marcus really as reminds us, we don't live there. We live in the real world where there are only hard decisions. Where the easy, simple problems get greedily gobbled up by lesser men and women.

It's the tough stuff that falls on us. That's okay. We're ready for it. Thanks for listening to The Daily Stood Podcast. And if you didn't know I also have another podcast and Daily Email every day I write something at dailydad.com which gets delivered to thousands of people all over the world. I record the meditations just like this one on the podcast for free. So if you're a parent, if you know a parent, if you're

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I'm Matt Bellasai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud from the build up, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of

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