Look at all the stuff that happens around you. The neighbor whose house burns down. The friend who comes down with a rare disorder. The actor whose career suddenly ends. The rock solid marriage that ends in divorce. Your competitor who is bankrupted by a patent lawsuit. The previously peaceful country that descends into civil […]
Ambrose Bierce was a man whose upbringing uniquely prepared him for the challenges of his life. You could say he was born into Stoicism, given that his father was named Marcus Aurelius Bierce and his uncle, who became a General in the US Army, was Lucius Verus Bierce (the name of Marcus’s stepbrother.). So while […]
Seneca poses a funny hypothetical. If you stopped the average successful, wealthy Roman patriarch as he left his home in the morning and asked him, “Where are you going? What are you doing today?” Their answer would be something like, “I don’t know…stuff.” They knew they were supposed to be doing things and saw their […]
Yesterday, we wrote about Thomas Edison’s grittiness, but yesterday was also the birthday of another incredible man from that era, a man who possessed nearly unlimited amounts of strength and fortitude. And the events of his life would require them. That man’s name was Abraham Lincoln. “This too shall pass” was Lincoln’s favorite saying, one he […]
This is a guest post by Monil Shah who has previously written the popular posts “5 Ways to Practice Goodness Today” and “Four Productivity Principles From The Stoics You Can Use Today” A couple of days before Christmas, my grandmother passed away. For most of us in the family, it was a shock. The doctors, […]
Last Christmas we wrote about the overlap between Seneca and Jesus—how both of them were born the same year and how many of their teachings are similar in nature. Many of you emailed and asked to learn more about the connections between Christianity and Stoicism, and we reached out to Joseph Dodson, an Associate Professor of […]
Meditations is perhaps the only document of its kind ever made. It is the private thoughts of the world’s most powerful man giving advice to himself on how to make good on the responsibilities and obligations of his positions. Trained in Stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius stopped almost every night to practice a series of spiritual […]
This is a guest post by Seth Blais, an advocate, writer, and person in recovery from addiction. You can contact him through his website www.sethblais.com or follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. *** I found myself withdrawing from heroin, unemployed, divorced, and laying restlessly in a twin-size bed in the small room I shared with a stranger. […]
Thomas Edison, who was born some 171 years ago yesterday, once explained that, in inventing, “the first step is an intuition—and comes with a burst—then difficulties arise.” What set Edison apart from other inventors was tolerance for these difficulties, his willingness to tackle the kinds of problems that are endemic to the process—not exceptions to […]