There is something delightfully simple about Ulysses S. Grant. Napoleon seems like some sort of larger than life figure, a peerless genius like the freak athletes we see on television. The same for the incredible heroism of Admiral Stockdale. Their accomplishments are impressive, but not exactly relatable.
Grant, on the other hand, is more like us. Not just because he struggled in life, or because he was uninterested in pomp or circumstance, but because his theory of war was so simple that even a grunt could understand it. As the brilliant historian S.C. Gwynne writes in Hymns of the Republic, Grant’s “main approach was to punch the enemy in the gut and then afterward worry about what the enemy had been planning to do to him.” Contemporaries said Grant was like the mythological Thor—he just kept hammering away at problems until they fell. “He did not stop,” Gywnne writes, “and he would not be deterred…He came directly at you and smashed into you again and again until you were beaten, then persisted beyond that to the nonexistent terms of your surrender.”
Simple, but it worked. What’s better is that it still works, in war and in life. Marcus Aurelius said we solve our problems action by action, step by step. He said we can’t get deterred just because they are hard, or because they are hard for us. If it’s humanly possible to do it, he said, then commit to doing it and know that you can do it. Cato, like Grant, had that same kind of determination. The only way you could beat him was to break him and you were not going to break him (which was clear from boyhood on, when a bully tried to intimidate him by dangling Cato off a balcony and all he got in response was silence and a stare that gave him the chills).
We could all use a little bit of that in our lives. Clench your jaw. Sit down (or stand up) and get to work. Don’t get excited. Don’t get discouraged. Just keep hammering away. That’s how you win a war and win at life. You solve most problems by beating them into submission. You crush resistance. You cannot be deterred and you cannot stop. If you can do that, then nothing can stop you.
P.S. This was originally sent on April 1, 2021. Sign up today for the Daily Stoic’s email and get our popular free 7-day course on Stoicism.
