# 01 Welcome To The Wealthy Stoic! *A Daily Stoic Guide To Being Rich, Free, and Happy!* #source/course << [[00 The Wealthy Stoic Course|Course Home]] | [[02 The Richest Stoic|Next]] >> --- > “[[For the wise do not love wealth]] but would rather have it… Wishing it to supply greater scope to practice virtue.” — [[Seneca]] Before the Stoics, most philosophers were poor. Diogenes the Cynic famously lived in a barrel and dressed in rags. As Aristotle put it in _Politics,_ all “persons who value the art of getting wealth” saw all the poor philosophers as a reason to stay away from philosophy. He then shares an anecdote about Thales of Miletus, one of those poor philosophers who people in ancient Greece pointed to as proof that “philosophy was of no use.” Thales decided to show that his pursuit of philosophy was genuine, that he was content without money, and not in the way Aesop’s Fox was convinced without the grapes. In _The Fox & the Grapes_, a Fox spots a mouth-watering bunch of grapes hanging from the highest branch on a tree. The Fox steps back to get a running start at jumping for the grapes, but falls short. He backs up further, runs, jumps, and falls short again. He tries and tries and tries, but never reaches the grapes. To comfort himself in this failure, the Fox convinces himself that they’re probably sour grapes anyways, and therefore not worth wearing himself out for. Until Thales, the general perception of the philosophers who claimed to be content with poverty was that they were fitting the story to their circumstances, to a reality where they didn’t have an option, where money was out of their reach. Thales flipped that narrative by making some smart moves that quickly earned him a vast sum of money. “Thus he showed the world,” Aristotle writes, “that philosophers can easily be rich if they like, but their ambition is of another sort.” We said in one of the emails announcing _The Wealthy Stoic_ that you can’t find a Stoic who wasn’t rich. It was a play on words–as there are **many definitions** of what it means to be rich. But like Thales, the Stoics showed the world that philosophers can be financially successful, but they also showed that philosophers do this without (for the most part*) forsaking their philosophical focus, those ambitions of another sort. Indeed, of all the schools of philosophy, none give us a more practical framework for becoming rich, free, and happy than Stoicism. None make it easier to reach for and grab (or ignore, if you chose) that proverbial bunch of grapes.  The next nine weeks are designed to equip you with the tools, mindsets, and habits of the wealthiest Stoics in history.  This course is going to walk along the path taken by famous Stoics like [[Marcus Aurelius]], [[Seneca]], and [[Epictetus]], as well as lesser known Stoics like Agrippinus, Chryssipus, and Cleanthes. And by the end of these nine weeks, you will know everything you need to know to be rich, free, and happy. We take our first step tomorrow. We hope you are as excited as we are! --- *We say "for the most part" because, as you will see in greater detail in the coming weeks, some of the Stoics who grew massive fortunes became cautionary tales, with stories defined by misguided ambitions.*