Every retail business knows about shrinkage–the percentage of goods shoplifted or stolen off the floor. Every manufacturer knows how to calculate their defect rate–because no production run is perfect. Every shipping company knows there will be an error rate, a delivery failure rate, even a disappeared-into-thin-air rate. Every credit card processor knows about fraudulent purchase rates and disputed charges. And the bigger the businesses, the larger these numbers are, certainly in terms of cost.

It’s frustrating. It’s expensive. It’s also a fact of life.

Marcus Aurelius writes that a world without obnoxious people is impossible, and a patient and wise person comes to understand that when they meet someone obnoxious, they are simply a percentage of the whole. So it goes in business, the entrepreneur, the leader, the accountant comes to accept that a certain amount of goods will be stolen, a certain amount will break, a certain amount will get lost.

Just like we do at Daily Stoic with the products we make and sell, you try to minimize the loss as best you can–but you will never get it to zero. Mistakes, theft, random acts of God, these are taxes and tolls, operating expenses. And as Seneca said, we must learn to pay these taxes, and pay them, as Seneca said of all the taxes of life, gladly and without complaint.

It’s madness to sweat every screw up. To get angry at every incurred fee or replacement. To take any of it personally. It’s torture to yourself and to the people who work for you. You have to accept it, practice what the Stoics call the ‘art of acquiescence,’ for a reasonable amount of it. You have to focus on growing the business on a whole, in fact understanding that as you grow the business, the shrinkage and defect and failure and fraud increases alongside it.

Such is life and we must pay its corresponding taxes.