It would be nice to be a comedian, wouldn’t it? Not because it might make you rich and famous, though that would be nice. But rather, for the opportunity it would afford to turn all the things that bother you in life into material. All the bad breaks could become set-ups; all the people who piss you off, you could turn into punchlines. As Judd Apatow writes in his wonderful book Sicker in the Head, “one of the magical things about being a comedian is when bad things happen you think, I can use this in an act, and it’s not purely bad.”

Talk about the obstacle being the way! Comedians get to use everything that happens to them in their life, in their work. Heartbreak. Frustration. Fear. Insecurity. Confusion. It all becomes material.

Yet the Stoics would have us know that this formula is available to all of us–whatever happens, whatever we do for a living. Entrepreneurs build businesses to solve problems that they have encountered in life. Parents get to use the pain and trauma and mistakes of their own childhood to do a better job for their children. Coaches take the defeats and losses and use them to teach lessons or create motivation. It has become a cliche at this point that therapists go into psychology and psychiatry with the hope that in helping others solve their problems they might solve their own.

Marcus Aurelius writes repeatedly in Meditations about how obstacles can become fuel, how like a fire we can transform everything–even the things we would never have wanted to experience–into flame and brightness and heat. In this way, we should take comfort in the fact that nothing that happens to us is purely bad. Everything has something in it that we can use to do some good (even if that’s just getting on stage to make other people laugh).

Whatever it is, whatever has happened or is currently happening, we must find a way to use it. To turn the fire into fuel, the obstacle into the opportunity.

That is our job.