Things go wrong. We get screwed over. We make mistakes. It happens. The idea that it  shouldn’t affect a Stoic? Preposterous. No amount of training, Seneca writes, takes away natural feelings. So it’s OK that you don’t like what happened. What matters is what happens next.

Take NFL coach Steve Wilks, for instance, who was recently passed over for a head coaching job he more than deserved. He took over as the interim coach for the ailing Carolina Panthers when they were 1-4 and led the team to a 7-10 finish. He won the overwhelming support of the locker room, and impressed the league.

And yet there he was…passed over for the job for a white head coach who had been fired just months before after leading the Colts to a 3-5-1 record. Was there a racial component to this? Maybe (Wilks has experienced that before). But whether it is or isn’t doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a thing that sucks–no one wants to lose out on a job. And if it is in fact another example of the race problem in the NFL, it only makes it more frustrating and painful.

This is why Wilks’ comments after he didn’t get the job are so perfect. “The sun rose this morning and by the grace of God so did I,” he explained. “I’m disappointed but not defeated. Many people aren’t built for this but I know what it means to persevere and see it through.” Disappointed but not defeated. The Stoics knew disappointment well…but they rarely despaired. They would have liked Wilks’ attitude, as well as the distinction that Hemingway made in The Old Man and The Sea, “Man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

You don’t control what the fates decide for you. You don’t choose to be passed over for a job. Nobody wants to come face to face with an error or an unpleasant reality. But you do control whether you give up, whether you let it break your heart, whether you are defeated.