The Practice: He kept failing

A quick note before we start.

This newsletter has a new name. It used to be The Stoic Handbook, like everything else I make. From now on the weekly email is called The Practice, because that is what it actually is. Not a digest. Not my best thoughts. One idea, pulled out of Epictetus or Marcus or Seneca, and put to work on your week.

Same person writing it. Same inbox. I am just being clearer about what it is for.

If you are new here, or you want a feel for the format, three posts are a good place to start: The Stoic Trick I Use When I Can’t Sleep, I Teach Stoicism. I’ve Been Using It to Hide., and One Rep in the Rain.

Right. This week.

This week I published a video on how Marcus, even though he’s the poster boy for Stoicism, really struggled with the task of being human over many years. I don’t fault him; being Emperor of Rome and trying to be as Stoic as Epictetus while doing it is playing life on hard mode for sure.

But it also got me thinking: did Marcus think he was a legendary Stoic practitioner? Probably not. And that puts me and a lot of other Stoic teachers, and in fact anyone who writes about self-improvement, in an interesting position. The question is… have you figured it all out yourself? Are you this perfected human being? And the answer is obviously… no.

What’s more problematic about this is that there are people who’ve never read a book or even heard of philosophy, and they may be better or more virtuous at certain things than us. So where does it leave us? Well, I don’t know if you noticed it, but hidden inside my line of thinking was comparison. Comparison is a tricky thing. Even the Stoics were big proponents of comparing ourselves to others with great qualities, looking up to them, and finding inspiration in them. The goal is to do this from the perspective of, “I can compare myself to others, but at the same time I will always just be myself.”

The dichotomy of control states that the only way I should compare myself to other people is through their ability to use good judgment. If we limit ourselves to a person’s ability to use good judgment and nothing else (not their talents or attributes, just their ability to use good judgment, which is something we all have), we can compare ourselves in a healthier way.

Everything always comes down to life being a series of proper judgments and poor judgments. When you look at someone you might feel envious of, you have to ask, “Would I want every part of this person’s life?” The way they use their judgment leads them to have all aspects of their life, not just a single part of it in isolation.

The takeaway is we can look at other people, observe how they use judgment, and admire it as a way to improve ourselves. The most important thing will always be how much better off we are now than we were before.

If you started as an absolute raging psychopath and Stoicism has got you down to just generally short-tempered, that might not look like much to anyone else. But the distance you’ve travelled is enormous.

Just like if you are completely paralyzed and you’ve done so much mobility that you can now walk a few steps. That is an incredible achievement, but it would be absurd for that person to compare themselves to an Olympic elite athlete. That is where the use of good and bad judgment comes in, and I think that’s how we need to view Marcus and all of our efforts as individuals who are learning and walking this path.

The source

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.9, in Gregory Hays’ translation: “Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise or moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human, however imperfectly, and fully embrace the pursuit.” He wrote that to himself after decades of practice, in a journal never meant for us. The book gets quoted as the record of a master. This passage only makes sense as the note of a man who was still failing, knew it, and stayed in training anyway.

The drill

This week, borrow Marcus’s actual method. Each morning, write one line at the top of a page: the lesson you keep having to relearn, phrased to yourself in the second person, the way he did. “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself...” Each night, one more line: where the lesson came up that day, and what you actually did. Don’t grade the day. Just log the rep. Seven days, fourteen lines. If the same failure shows up five times, you are in good company. The Emperor of Rome logged his for a decade.

From the studio

This week’s video is the full case file on Marcus the struggler: the passages where he argues with himself about getting out of bed, the ten anger strategies, and why the Stoics’ word for a practitioner was prokopton, the one still in training, never sage. I went through all of it here:

Hit reply and tell me the lesson you keep having to relearn.

Go well,

Jon.