How To Be A Stoic

The universe doesn’t bow to your wishes, it does what it does; your boss, your coworkers, the shareholders of your company, your customers, and a number of other factors are part of the universe, so why would you expect them to do your bidding?

regret is a waste of our emotional energy.

regret is a waste of our emotional energy. We cannot change the past—it is outside of our control. We can, and should, learn from it, but the only situations we can do something about are those happening here and now.

they were wise enough to make the distinction between their internal goals, over which they had control, and the external outcome, which they could influence but not control.

What Epictetus was telling me, then, was that it is best to look the reality of life straight in the face, with courage.

enjoy the company and love of our fellow humans as much as possible while we can, trying hard not to take them for granted, because it is certain that one day we and they will be gone and the only right “season” for appreciating them will have passed.

When it comes to food, responsible people favor what is easy to obtain over what is difficult, what involves no trouble over what does, and what is available over what isn’t.” Now this strikes very close to

When it comes to food, responsible people favor what is easy to obtain over what is difficult, what involves no trouble over what does, and what is available over what isn’t.”

“If [you] must live in a palace,9 then [you] can also live well in a palace.”

This is what good philosophers—and reasonable people in general—are supposed to do: listen to each other’s arguments, learn and reflect, and go out for a beer to talk it over some more.

is simply the realization that what is important in life is to live it well,

we must have wisdom3—the ability to navigate well the diverse, complex, and often contradictory circumstances of our lives.

four aspects of virtue, which they thought of as four tightly interlinked character traits: (practical) wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice.

wisdom allows us to make decisions that improve our eudaimonia, the (ethically) good life.

Courage can be physical, but more broadly refers to the moral aspect—for instance, the ability to act well under challenging circumstances,

Temperance makes it possible for us to control our desires and actions so that we don’t yield to excesses.

Justice, for Socrates and the Stoics, refers not to an abstract theory of how society should be run, but rather to the practice of treating other human beings with dignity and fairness.

virtue is an all-or-nothing package.

Cognitive dissonance is a very uncomfortable psychological state that occurs when someone becomes aware of the conflict between two judgments that he holds to be equally true.

Observing and imitating role models, then, is one powerful way to work on our own virtue.