Stoics That Ship

1) Read (a book!) for 10 minutes

2) Be kind

3) Do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing

4) Declutter your immediate area

5) Meditate

6) Ask yourself, “what would a better version of myself do right now?”

7) Write down one thing you’re thankful for

8) Take a walk

9) Breath deeply.  In through your nose, and out through your mouth.

You could be one of two types of people. The first type sees someone who has accomplished something and asks, Why them, why not me?

The second type sees someone who has accomplished something and asks themselves, If they can do it, why can't I?

A focus on the past is depression.

A focus on the future is anxiety.

As Stoics, we should always place our focus on which we can control.  We must also acknowledge that when things go wrong (and they will), that there may have been something you could have done to prevent it.  It is possible to live according to nature to a fault.

For instance, in a workplace environment you may feel frustrated by a micromanaging superior or manager.  You might say to yourself, “I’m the one who does this every day, I don’t need someone snooping over my shoulder.”

Be mindful of the language you use on a daily basis.  One of the worst examples of this is beginning a sentence with “I need to...”

There’s a saying by Greek poet Archilochus: “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”.  This is another way of saying a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

“So in the majority of other things, we address circumstances not in accordance with the right assumptions, but mostly by following wretched habit. Since all that I’ve said is the case, the person in training must seek to rise above...

—Musonius Rufus, Lectures, 6.25.5–11 

Today, it is no longer enough to generate extended value for those around us (our families, our co-workers, our bosses, even ourselves), by simply acting out of habit.  Anyone can act out of habit, and those around you will seek out others if you allow your value to dwindle over time.  If something can be done out of habit, then it can be automated.

More problems, that's what. If you are out of problems, then you are at the end of your life.

If you didn’t learn these things in order to demonstrate them in practice, what did you learn them for?  - Epictetus

And he’s right.  It’s not enough to study or ready about Stoicism.  Those activities are what they are: studying and reading.

I start each day identifying no more than THREE accomplishments I would need to know I had a successful day. Write these down and put them in an accessible place that you can see throughout the day. You need to be aware of your goals throughout the day.

To help identify these three goals, I use a process called batching, which is worthy of its own post. I'll summarize it shortly as: take all of your to do lists and put them in front of you, look for similarities in the end customer (i.e who you are shipping to), and group them together. Each of these is a batch.

A good comparison would be running the dishwasher. Do you run the dishwasher each time you use a plate and fork? Of course not, you wait until it is full and then start the cycle.

The reason for this is that there are fixed resources expelled when running the dishwasher. No matter how many dishes are inside, the cycle takes the same amount of time, uses the same amount of soap, and the same amount of water.

“Throw out your conceited opinions, for it is impossible for a person to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.” — Epictetus, “Discourses,” 2.17.1

If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.   Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life, 19

One of the most surefire ways to lose weight is to begin a food journal.  It’s pretty simple, just write down everything that you eat and when you ate it every day.  The idea being that when we are confronted with our bad habits in the form of a timeline, we can truly see how much we are imbibing.  This combined with the guilt associated with having to write down that you are eating junk food is just enough to make you think twice.

The same approach works with our actions.  My initial version of this was a Google sheet with four columns: Date, Action, Time, and “Why am I doing this?”.  The last column being the most important.  This is where you can take time to reflect on your action, whether positive or negative, and recognize if that’s a habit you should cultivate or one you should think twice about.

I refined the spreadsheet with a fifth column called “Productivity”. Here I entered one of the below:

“+ +” for peak performance.  If something is “+ +”, you are breaking down barriers and making an example for those around you.

“+” for normal performance.  I would use this for actions that are required, but routine.  This puts you in a spot so you can get to “+ +” later.

“-” ehh, not your best.  An example would be web browsing for a few minutes at work or flipping around social media for a bit.

“- -” for complete waste of time.  Extended time on Instagram or Facebook, reality television, video games etc.

Give the above methods a try for just a few days (I do this for 3 - 4 consecutive days per month) then evaluate on how you feel after the days when you see lots of “+ +” and “+”.  I think you’ll find that you feel better about yourself and closer to those around you.

...in their own story.

When we feel that we have been harmed by others, it’s useful to look back and see the world from their point of view.  The ego will tell you to take it personally, that they meant to do you harm.  See Meditations 7.63:

Every soul, the philosopher says, is involuntarily deprived of truth; consequently in the same way it is deprived of justice and temperance and benevolence and everything of the kind. It is most necessary to bear this constantly in mind, for thus thou wilt be more gentle towards all.

We have all had times where we felt stuck.  We look at our calendar or our to do list, and we just can’t summon the motivation to begin any of it.  The concept of “Ready, Fire, Aim” can help us build the momentum to accomplish our goals no matter the size.

The reason that we lack motivation towards accomplishing our goals is because we have not assigned a powerful enough emotional reward with accomplishing it.  However, in order for us to cultivate the emotions to motivate us towards our goals, we need to take action.  You can see the conundrum.  To take action we need motivation, to get motivation we need to take a action.

The phrase “Ready, Aim, Fire” is pretty easy to follow when applying to accomplishing our goals.  You steady yourself, you identify your goals, you execute a plan to accomplish them.  Easy!

Except this is divorced from the emotional reward necessary to take action in the first place.  There are lots of things in life that we have to do whether or not we will reap an emotional reward.  That report for your boss, packing your kids lunch, feeding the dog etc.  These are all things we have to do, but the rewards are pretty insignificant.

I recently finished Advice Not Given: A Guide to Getting Over Yourself by Dr. Mark Epstein.  As with his other work, this explores the overlaps between Buddhism and western psychotherapy.  For better or worse, the passage that stuck with my the most was found in the Epilogue, paraphrased below:

Suzuki Roshi, who was one of the first ambassadors of Buddhism to the USA, describes “mind waves” as the turmoil your ego causes on your everyday life.  Mind waves are just live waves in the ocean, and by learning to see these waves as just parts of the overall whole of the ocean, we can control our ego and other “selves”.

This is very similar to passage 5.24 in Meditations:

Think of substance in its entirety, of which you have the smallest of shares; and of time in its entirety, of which a brief and momentary span has been assigned to you; and of the works of destiny, and how very small is your part in them.

The wave analogy did not click with me right away during my meditation practice, but it lead me to thinking about the similarities between bodies of water and how our ego invades our focus.  As anyone who has meditated for any length of time knows, the moment you try to focus your awareness, your mind is immediately assaulted with all sorts of thoughts.  These thoughts invade our consciousness and by sharpening your meditation practice, you can train yourself to dispense of them quickly and refocus on the moment.

Psychologist William James pioneered the Two Minds Theory, the notion being that our behavoir is not the result of a single, cognitive function.  Rather, we are the product of two distinct, separate processes.  i.e Two Minds.

The first of which is the automatic process.  This is the area of your brain which uses tens of thousands of years of evolution combined with your prior experiences to make reactive decisions.  It’s really useful for pulling your hand off a hot stove or fighting off a bear, not so much for meaningful interactions with other human beings.  This is what you might call the “Reactive Mind”; it’s automatic and we cannot stop it.  We can only hope to contain it.

The second is the slower, more thoughtful process.  This is the one that observes (and responds to) the reactive mind.  It’s up to us whether we will go along with the reactive mind, or learn to tell the difference between the two.  I’ll call this the “Responsive Mind”.