You Make Your Own Good Fortune

Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy in the United States and an unsung hero in the history of the world, was once asked by a Congressman if he was prepared for the upcoming hearing in which Hyman needed to speak about a number of complex, important issues. "Yes," Rickover replied, "I shaved and put on a clean shirt." Rickover didn’t need to prepare because he was prepared. He wasn’t some figurehead who had to be briefed before answering questions. He knew his science and his department inside out. Because he lived and breathed his work—famously interviewing something like 14,000 college grads himself for various positions over the years. He also personally tested every nuclear submarine during its initial sea trial after construction. His joke about preparing by getting dressed calls to mind an analogy by Marcus Aurelius, who said that a true philosopher is a fighter not a fencer. A fencer has to put on armor and pick up a weapon. A fighter just has to close their fist. That should be our model too. We shouldn’t be cramming the night before a test, or frantically looking for advice once a crisis has arrived. We need to be prepared. We need to be so on top of our work—and the knowledge required—that everything we need is right there, already in our hands and in our heads. If you’re rushing, you’re already too late. If you’re looking for your weapons, you’re already beaten. You gotta know your stuff inside and out. You have to live it and breathe it. You gotta be ready. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

27 Maalis 20192min

AJ Jacobs is known for his unique style of immersion journalism. He’s lived, literally, according to the Bible. He’s went out and met every obscure relative he could find in his family tree. In his new book, Thanks A Thousand, he went on a quest to personally thank every person who had a hand in making his morning cup of coffee—the farmers, the woman who does pest control for the warehouse where the coffee is stored, the man who designed the lid, the baristas, and on and on.This last journey was the least physically trying but the most transformative. In our interview with AJ for DailyStoic.com, he explained just how wonderful this forced exercise in gratitude has been:One big change was related to the Stoic idea of the self-interested case for virtue. The idea that acting badly makes you feel badly. That whoever does wrong, wrongs himself. But when you act virtuously, you get a little burst of happiness.So during this project, I’d wake up in a grumpy mood, but I’d force myself to call or visit or email folks to thank them for their role in my coffee. Admittedly, some were baffled. They’d say, “Is this a pyramid scheme?” But the majority were really pleased to hear from me.I remember I called the woman who does pest control for the warehouse where my coffee is stored. And I said, “I know this sounds strange, but I want to thank you for keeping the bugs out of my coffee.” And she said, “That does sound strange. But thank YOU. You made my day.”And that, in turn, made my day. By forcing myself to act in a grateful way, I became less grouchy. Ideally, gratitude should be a two-way street. It should give both parties a little dopamine boost.The word Epictetus uses for gratitude—eucharistos—means “seeing” what is actually occurring in each moment. He said, “It is easy to praise providence for anything that may happen if you have two qualities: a complete view of what has actually happened in each instance, and a sense of gratitude.” Part of what made AJ’s journey so meaningful to him and to everyone else involved is that they were really seeing each other for the first time. He was really looking—and when he saw, he said thanks.It’s a good model for us to try in our lives. Take some time today to stop, take a step back, and get a complete view—like that there are over a thousand people involved in making your morning cup of coffee possible. There’s a lot we take for granted. In every moment, there are limitless opportunities to say thanks. Take them!P.S. Check out our full interview with A.J. Jacobs and check out his new book Thanks A Thousand—it's a great reminder of the amazing interconnectedness of our world and teaches us how gratitude can make our lives happier, kinder, and more impactful.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

26 Maalis 20193min

It was said that Socrates saw his difficult marriage as a sort of challenge that life threw at him—that the fact that his wife’s personality and interests were often at odds with his own was something he could be made better by for being patient with. Certainly, Marcus Aurelius was tested by his difficult son, and likely spent many sleepless nights worrying about what would become of this boy who just couldn’t quite get it together. So, too, are each of us tested by the difficult relationships that life throws our way. For some of us, that’s an absent father, for others, it’s a sister with a drug problem. We have co-workers who are drama queens, bosses who are assholes, and neighbors who are meddlesome. Each of these situations is a trial, one that challenges us and forces us to apply the lessons that we’ve learned in our reading and through our studies. Can you learn how to love someone who has trouble loving back? Can you learn how to forgive someone for their flaws? Can you develop the self-control necessary to not lose your temper when they provoke you? Can you put up appropriate boundaries? Can you say “No” when it’s appropriate and say, “Yes” when someone really needs you, even when it would be easier to focus on your own needs?Relationships test us, but they also teach us. They bring with them both obstacles and opportunities. What matters, then, is how we respond and who we become in the process. No one ever said that family or friendships would be easy—they just said the trouble would be worth it in the end. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

25 Maalis 20192min

The German poet Friedrich Schiller supposedly liked to write with a drawer filled with rotting apples tucked into his desk. The smell was overpowering, but he couldn’t write without it. Apparently, it got the words flowing.How could that possibly be the case? Maybe it was just a weird quirk or a fetish. Maybe it was a weird part of his writing routine (more on those here). Or maybe, the proximity to decay was an inspiring metaphor, a sort of aromatic memento mori.Marcus Aurelius once wrote a strange meditation along those lines:The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag.Look at it clearly. If you can.Life is that stench, he was saying. We are the rotten meat in a skin bag. From the second we’re born, time starts ticking towards our expiration date. A lot of people want to turn away from that. They want to pretend it’s not real. We’ve gotten very good over the millennia at coming up with ways to help us pretend and to turn away. It’s why so many people are unproductive—they think they can afford to be, because they’re in denial of their mortality and the fact that life is rot, rot, rotting away as they sit there dicking around.Maybe that’s what the awful smell of fermenting apples did for Schiller. We’ll never really know, but it’s a powerful reminder for us this morning, nonetheless.Memento mori. Tempus fugit.Grab it while it’s here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

22 Maalis 20192min

All of us are trying to find something. Trying to find meaning, love, contentment. Because we feel like something is missing. That’s why we keep ourselves so busy, why we kill ourselves with work, why we can’t be still.This drive is what allows us to accomplish things. So it’s not all bad. The problem is that when we do accomplish things, we often don’t feel that much better. We look back at the road we just traveled, we look down at the mountain we just scaled, and we think to ourselves: this is it? We never seem to fill the void.As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You've wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.” Isn’t that exactly right?What we have to realize is that more is not the answer to our problems: more sex, more money, more power and renown. These will never satisfy the place inside us that never feels full. Nor will magical thinking, or plant medicines in the jungles of Peru. No, you don’t fill the void by fleeing from it or by compensating with externals. According to the Stoics, we satisfy it simply by living our life as nature demands. By being good, by being true to ourselves, by focusing, by not wasting a second wishing anything was otherwise or caring what other people think of us. We just live, as well as we can. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

21 Maalis 20192min

Gretchen Rubin is one of the most thought-provoking and influential experts on habits and happiness. She has written several New York Times best sellers, which have sold millions of copies, including The Happiness Project and Happier at Home. She also hosts the award-winning podcast Happier with Gretchen Rubin. In short, Gretchen Rubin has thought a lot about what it means to live a happy life.Her new book Outer Order, Inner Calm is a playbook that helps readers discover ways to make more room for happiness in their lives. This is something the Stoics were often writing about—finding stillness and tranquility, ridding of nonessentials that clutter our lives, learning to stay calm and sane amid life’s chaos and craziness.In our interview with Gretchen, we asked how she maintains that inner calm with something so hectic and uncertain like a book launch,I think about actions, not outcomes. That way, I stay focused on the things I can control (more or less). So I don’t think about “making the book a success,” but “writing the best book I possibly can.”That’s a good rule for all of us—doing the right things, right now. Putting our best efforts into the tasks in front of us today. Taking care of the inputs and detaching from the outcomes. Not worrying about what might happen later, or the results, or the whole picture, or the opinions of others.“The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do,” Marcus said. “Only what you do.” Today and always, find clarity and tranquility in the simplicity of focusing on doing the best you possibly can in everything you do.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

20 Maalis 20192min

Seneca tells the story of the philosopher Crates, who was walking in Athens when he saw a young man talking to no one around. “What are you doing?” Crates asked. “I am talking to myself,” the man replied. “Be careful,” Crates told him, “for you are communing with a bad man!” Whether this young man was in fact a bad kid or not, Seneca doesn’t say. One suspects Crates was joking—unless it was his practice to go around insulting complete strangers. Or it may have been that Crates was referring less to the quality of that stranger’s soul and was instead making a more general point about the dialogues we are all prone to having with ourselves—conversations that are hardly productive or healthy. The writer Anne Lamott spoke of a radio station, KFKD (K-Fucked) which plays in far too many our heads:Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is. Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything that one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one had no talent or insight, and on and on and on. Maybe that’s what Crates was warning the young man about. Yes, part of Stoicism is getting in touch with our inner nature and listening to the truth inside of us. But another part of it is learning what to ignore—the voice of anxiety and worry, the voice of ego and hubris, the voice of fear, the voices of self-loathing and unending ambition. We have to beware of the many tones to that voice in our head, we have to beware of communing with that bad influence. It’s just as dangerous as talking to a bad person...even if that person is us. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

19 Maalis 20192min

Epictetus was born a slave. Quite literally, his name means, in Greek, acquired. Ultimately, he came to be the property of a man named Epaphroditus, who kept Epictetus chained up long enough that he became disabled by it and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.His body and his time and his labor were controlled by someone else. That’s what slavery is. But what’s remarkable is that even in this state, Epictetus retained freedom in one important sense, and it would be this that his teachings would later revolve around: People could do whatever they wanted to his body, but his mind always remained his to control. No one had the power to make him bitter, to make him lose his desire for life, to take away his power to choose to think a certain way. (You may recall the Hurricane Carter story in The Obstacle is the Way, along similar lines)Compare that to say, Seneca, who was perfectly free to live and do whatever he wished from the day he was born yet was driven by his own ambition willingly into the arms of Nero...an embrace that only death was able to sever. Or more dramatically, look at the rich and powerful Romans mocked by Seneca and Marcus and Epictetus alike who were free on paper but in truth were wrapped around the finger of a mistress or wine or a desire for fame. Or more ordinarily, the regular people who are enslaved to their anxieties, insecurities, or false impressions.It was this, AA Long writes, that is really the core of Epictetus’s understanding of Stoicism: “You can be externally free and internally a slave...conversely you could be externally obstructed or even in literal bondage but internally free from frustration and disharmony.”It’s really a remarkable insight and one we must think of always. Yes, every person is entitled to physical freedom. No one, thankfully, is legally enslaved basically anywhere in the civilized world anymore. And yet plenty of us are not truly free, not nearly as free as Epictetus was when he was still in chains.And that is a real crime against humanity.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

18 Maalis 20193min