Earlier last week, a linebacker for the Chicago Bears saw a man choking at a restaurant at the airport in Austin. Jerrell Freeman jumped into action and performed the Heimlich maneuver twice, saving the stranger’s life. On the orders of a village council, Mukhtar Mai was raped by 4 different men in 2002 in Pakistan. Cultural tradition suggested […]
Perhaps your brother messed something big up. Maybe he owes you some money. Maybe he overstayed his welcome at your house or he won’t respect your wishes. Maybe it’s a different family member. Maybe it’s a friend. After all, every family and every friendship has its dysfunctions. What do you do? “My brother is wronging […]
Hobbes would say that life is the war of all against all. That humans are violent and selfish and untrustworthy. The Stoics wouldn’t disagree with that characterization. Epictetus knew real slavery first hand, he was a victim of the whim of a tyrant. Marcus would say that life itself was warfare and being kept from your home. Yet, unlike Hobbes, there […]
It was Epicurus who said “vain is the word of the philosopher that doesn’t heal the suffering of man.” The Stoics would agree, but took it further: Believing that philosophy was in the works not the words. It’s why they held up Cato as the ultimate example of Stoic philosophy, because of how he lived, not how he spoke […]
There is a harshness and a hardness to the Stoics. But there is also a softness and a grace, the velvet glove over the iron first. Think of Marcus talking about how we must come to our “journey’s end with a good grace, just as an olive falls when it is fully ripe, praising the earth that […]
There’s a great exchange between Epictetus and a student that encapsulates the true path to lasting, perennial success in any field. “Tell me what to do!” the student says. Epictetus corrects him, “It would be better to say, ‘Make my mind adaptable to any circumstances.’” It is true for your chosen field, just as it is for life. […]
It was a difficult road for Michele Tafoya to make it to the top of sports journalism. She was a woman breaking into an almost entirely male domain, she conquered an eating disorder and suffered multiple miscarriages. And this is to say nothing of the difficulties of the actual job itself—with its grueling travel schedule, […]
There’s value in learning not just from Stoic philosophers, but from “natural Stoics”—people who have lived with the kind of wisdom we want to cultivate in ourselves, even if they never called themselves Stoics. That kind of model doesn’t have to be a Cato, a Seneca, a Marcus Aurelius, or some distant historical figure. We can find natural […]
“It does not matter what you bear, but how you bear it,” Seneca said. We don’t choose whether we were born into privilege or poverty, whether we were given great genetic gifts or dealt incredible setbacks. What matters is how you bear this, what you make of it. Some find incredible success, and the temptations and […]