The more you schedule and practice discomfort deliberately, the less unplanned discomfort will throw off your life and control your life.
Stoicism can help you to become a better, kinder person. In helping you to become less emotionally reactive (e.g., reflexively angry or annoyed), it helps you to better resolve conflict, and teach others to do the same.
Most losses or mistakes are really survivable.
The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you.
Don’t get angry, don’t get even – focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.
I’ve heard it said before, I certainly didn’t come up with the expression, “Everything you want is just outside your comfort zone.” Why don’t you proactively develop an ability to widen that comfort zone?
To do anything remotely interesting you need to train yourself to be effective at dealing with, responding to, even enjoying criticism.
Both Stoicism and Buddhism focus quite extensively on awareness of impermanence, so the practices are often complementary.
I view Stoicism not only as a means for greater effectiveness—which it certainly is — but also as a tool for creating a better, less divisive world. To quote Sam Harris, PhD, “No society in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”
It’s possible to immediately “be tougher,” starting with your next decision. Have trouble saying “no” to dessert? Be tougher. Make that your starting decision. Feeling winded? Take the stairs anyway. Ditto. It doesn’t matter how small or big you start. If you want to be tougher, be tougher.
Even if you only care about service to others, altruism, or being an instrument for good, to have the desired impact, you cannot be ruled by knee-jerk emotions, crying over spilt milk, and so on.
Practicing poverty or practicing rehearsing your worst case scenario in real life, not just journaling, not just in your head, I find very, very important.
I expose myself to a lot of duress and pain in say, the form of ice baths and cold exposure simply to develop my tolerance for the then unavoidable pain and disruption that comes to all of us.
Simply reading Stoic passages in preparation for the day helps me to ideally, ignore, and when I cannot ignore, not respond to, certainly not engage with critics who have unfounded attacks.
Getting a dog has made me a better person and a better Stoic. My pup Molly has no bad intentions when she does most “bad” things, for instance. As a puppy, she did what puppies do, of course: peed in the wrong places, chewed things up, disobeyed or ignored commands (mostly because I was unclear), etc.. She trained me to not overreact and get mad, which was pointless and actually made things worse for both of us. (Question asked was “How has getting a dog changed your life?”)
On practising Stoicism: You can go into various places like a Starbucks, and practice doing the lay down challenge. This is laying down on the floor without saying anything to anyone, not telling them you’re doing an exercise, lay down on the floor for 10 seconds. If they ask if you’re all right, you say “yes I’m totally fine.” And then you get back up like nothing happened and continue on with waiting in line or whatever you were doing.
On practising Stoicism: Another option would be doing what my friend Noah Kagan calls the coffee challenge. Going into any type of coffee shop, if you don’t like coffee it could be tea, it could be water, it doesn’t matter. When you get to the end of the line and you’re placing your order, you ask for 10 percent off.
Studying dog training, and really dedicating myself to good books and teachers (like “Don’t Shoot The Dog!” and “Command Performance” (Whole Dog Journal), or Susan Garrett) taught me a ton about training any mammal, including humans and myself. It’s been a great way to learn more about how we all respond to rewards, punishment, and feedback. This awareness has helped me to become a less stressed and more effective person.
In my experience, particularly when combined with Buddhist “metta” or loving-kindness meditation, Stoicism can foster greater compassion and empathy.
I’ve found that while Stoicism helps me to be very non-reactive, and to accomplish and achieve more with less wasted energy.
