Dichotomy of control. Govern what obeys you.
Nineteen centuries ago, a man born a slave divided the world into two columns: what is up to you and what is not. Nearly all the wear of a life comes from confusing them.
Stoicism is not learned by collecting sayings. It is learned like a craft: through small exercises, repeated every day, at three specific moments. That is how the people who wrote it practiced it.
You save quotes from Marcus Aurelius. You have watched videos about Seneca. You know, more or less, that some things are up to you and some are not. And yet the same meeting unsettles you, the same remark takes over your afternoon, and the same task is still waiting.
It is not a lack of information. Stoicism was never information. For those who taught it, it was a training, and a training that is only read about produces nothing.
Knowing about Stoicism and practicing it are two different things. What follows is about the second.
It is a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens, around 300 BC. It takes its name from the painted porch, the Stoa Poikile, where he taught. Centuries later, in Rome, it was practiced by an advisor to Nero, Seneca; a former slave, Epictetus; and an emperor, Marcus Aurelius.
Its central thesis is simple to state and hard to live: the only true good is virtue, that is, judging well and acting well. Everything else, health, money, reputation, may be preferred, but it does not decide whether a life is good. What disturbs us, Epictetus said, is not things themselves but the judgments we make about them.
If the problem lies in judgment, the work lies in judgment too. And judgment can be trained.
"Stop arguing
about what a good man should be.
Be one."
It is not suppressing emotions.
The Stoics did not ask anyone to stop feeling. They distinguished involuntary reactions, a start of alarm or a blush, from the passions, which arise when you accept a mistaken judgment as true. Seneca analyzes this in Book II of On Anger: the first impulse is not chosen; what you do with it is. The school also recognized healthy emotions, such as serene joy.
It is not being “stoic” in the everyday sense.
In common usage, a stoic is someone who endures without complaining. That is endurance, not philosophy. Stoicism is not about gritting your teeth, but about reexamining the judgment that makes a situation unbearable.
It is not passivity.
Accepting what is not up to you does not mean ceasing to act. It means acting with all your strength where you do govern, without handing your peace over to the outcome.
The Stoic texts describe a routine that repeats: preparing before going out into the world, watching your judgment while you are in it, and examining the day when you return. None of the three takes more than ten minutes.
In the morning, prepare.
Marcus Aurelius opens Book II of his private notes with an exercise in anticipation. Not to fear the day, but so that what can be foreseen does not catch him off guard:
"At dawn, tell yourself beforehand: I shall meet the meddler,
the ungrateful, the insolent, the treacherous, the envious, the unsociable.
All this befalls them through ignorance of what is good and what is evil."
Epictetus called it prosoche: sustained attention to one’s own judgments. In the Discourses he warns that if you let it slip for a while, you cannot recover it whenever you wish. The practice is minimal: when something unsettles you, stop and ask yourself what judgment you are making and whether it is up to you.
At night, Seneca examined himself. He learned it from his teacher Sextius, who before sleeping asked himself what ill he had cured that day, what vice he had resisted, and in what respect he was better. Seneca describes his own habit this way:
"When the light has been taken away and my wife, who knows my habit, has fallen silent,
I examine my whole day and measure again what I have done and said.
I hide nothing from myself. I pass over nothing."
The Enchiridion, by Epictetus.
It is a short handbook, compiled by his student Arrian, that can be read in an afternoon. It begins with the distinction between what is up to you and what is not, and everything else is ordered from there. It is the best starting point because it is the most direct.
The Letters to Lucilius, by Seneca.
They are 124 letters written in his final years to a younger friend. They deal with concrete problems: fear, time, death, friendship. Read them slowly, a few each week. In the second letter Seneca himself advises against jumping from author to author: whoever is everywhere is nowhere.
The Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius.
It is not a treatise but a notebook the emperor wrote for himself, in Greek. He repeats himself, corrects himself, exhorts himself. That is why it makes more sense once you have started practicing: it is proof that someone with all the power in the world was still training the basics.
Collecting quotes.
Epictetus anticipated it in the Enchiridion: sheep do not show the shepherd how much they have eaten; they digest it and produce wool and milk. A saved quote has not been digested. A quote applied to a concrete situation has.
Waiting to feel stoic.
There is no day when serenity arrives and then you begin. It is the other way around. Epictetus reminds us in the Discourses that nothing great comes into being all at once, not even a bunch of grapes or a fig: first it blossoms, then it bears fruit, then it ripens.
Turning it into a personality.
Calling yourself a Stoic, talking about Stoicism, wearing the image. The same chapter of the Enchiridion advises never to call yourself a philosopher and not to talk about principles among those who do not practice them, but to do what follows from them.
Stoicism does not show in what you say about it. It shows in how you respond when something goes wrong.
Before you look at your phone, write three lines on what could go wrong today and how you want to respond if it happens. Not to fear it: so that it does not catch you off guard.
When something unsettles you, pause for a moment and name the judgment: “this is unfair,” “this is a disaster.” Then ask yourself whether it is up to you.
Before sleeping, three questions in writing: what did I do well, where did I fall short, what will I do differently tomorrow. No punishment. Only inventory.
If you had to keep a single idea to begin with, it would be the one that opens the Enchiridion: some things are up to you and others are not. The three exercises revolve around it. In the morning you anticipate what you will not govern; during the day, you distinguish; at night, you review where you put your energy.
You do not need to understand all of Stoicism to start practicing it. You need a notebook and a week.
At Método Corso, this is the way of working: an idea is always carried into a concrete action and reviewed in writing. What is not exercised never reaches behavior, and what does not reach behavior does not change character.
Prepare. Attend. Review. Tomorrow, again.
With the Enchiridion of Epictetus, which is short and direct, and with three daily exercises: preparing for the day in the morning, paying attention to your judgments during the day and reviewing it at night. Reading gives direction; the exercises are what change behavior.
The Enchiridion of Epictetus. Then Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, read slowly, and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, which make more sense once you have already started practicing.
No. The Stoics distinguished involuntary reactions, which are not chosen, from the passions that arise from a mistaken judgment. The work consists in reexamining that judgment, not in suppressing what you feel.
A few minutes in the morning, a few minutes at night, and attention in the moments when something unsettles you. Regularity matters more than duration.
It is Epictetus’s distinction between what is up to you (your judgments, decisions, desires and aversions) and what is not (the body, reputation, outcomes, other people’s conduct). It is the first concept worth understanding, because the others are ordered from it.
Extended PDF version with a first week of practice: six written tasks to prepare, attend to and review your days the Stoic way.
Download the PDFNineteen centuries ago, a man born a slave divided the world into two columns: what is up to you and what is not. Nearly all the wear of a life comes from confusing them.
Wisdom, justice, courage and temperance. For the Stoics they were not four ornaments of character. They were the only true good, seen from four sides.
Between what happens and what you do there is an instant in which something inside you says “yes.” The Stoics called the attention that watches over that instant prosoche.
No spam. Just the system.
Downloading...