Remember that your ruling reason becomes unconquerable when it rallies and relies on itself, so that it won’t do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational. How much more unconquerable if its judgments are careful and made rationally? Therefore, the mind freed from passions is an impenetrable fortress—a person has no more secure place of refuge for all time.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.48

Bruce Lee once made an interesting claim: “I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks once,” he said, “but I fear the man who has practiced one kick ten thousand times.” When we repeat an action so often it becomes unconscious behavior, we can default to it without thinking.

Training in the martial arts or combat is a deeply thoughtful study of movement. We sometimes think of soldiers as automatons, but what they’ve actually built is a steady pattern of unconscious behaviors. Any of us can build these.

When Marcus says that a mind can get to a place where “it won’t do anything contrary to its own will, even if its position is irrational,” what he means is that proper training can change your default habits. Train yourself to give up anger, and you won’t be angry at every fresh slight. Train yourself to avoid gossip, and you won’t get pulled into it. Train yourself on any habit, and you’ll be able to unconsciously go to that habit in trying times.

Think about which behaviors you’d like to be able to default to if you could. How many of them have you practiced only once? Let today be twice.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Difficulties show a person’s character. So when a challenge confronts you, remember that God is matching you with a younger sparring partner, as would a physical trainer. Why? Becoming an Olympian takes sweat! I think no one has a better challenge than yours, if only you would use it like an athlete would that younger sparring partner.
—Epictetus, Discourses, 1.24.1-2

The Stoics loved to use metaphors from the Olympics, especially wrestling. Like us, they saw sports as both a fun pastime as well as a training ground to practice for the challenges one will inevitably face in the course of living. As General Douglas MacArthur once said, in words later engraved at the gymnasium at West Point:

UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE
ARE SOWN THE SEEDS
THAT, UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS
WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY.

Everyone has found themselves outmatched by an opponent, frustrated by some skill or attribute they have that we don’t—height, speed, vision, whatever. How we choose to respond to that struggle tells us about who we are as athletes and who we’ll be as people. Do we see it as a chance to learn and get stronger? Do we get frustrated and complain? Or worse, do we call it off and find an easier game to play, one that makes us feel good instead of challenged?

The greats don’t avoid these tests of their abilities. They seek them out because they are not just the measure of greatness, they are the pathway to it.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

When forced, as it seems, by circumstances into utter confusion, get a hold of yourself quickly. Don’t be locked out of the rhythm any longer than necessary. You’ll be able to keep the beat if you are constantly returning to it.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6.11

We’re going to get caught off guard from time to time. Not just by “black swan” type events—a terrorist attack or a financial panic—but also by minor, unexpected occurrences. Your car battery dies, your friend cancels at the last minute, you suddenly don’t feel well. These situations have a way of throwing us into confusion and disarray. We’re made an assumption about the world and built plans on top of that assumption. Now that the assumption has collapsed, so too might our organization or understanding.

That’s perfectly OK! It happens. A line of infantrymen will face withering attacks—what’s key is that they don’t allow chaos to reign. Musicians will experience technical difficulties and lose their place from time to time. In both cases, it just matters that they get back into position as quickly as possible.

The same is true for you today. The order and the peace might be interrupted by a new circumstance. OK. Get a hold of yourself and find your way back.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.61

Dancing is a popular metaphor for life. One must be limber and agile and go along with the music. One must feel and follow and flow with their partner. But anyone who has tried to do something difficult, where there is competition or an adversary, knows that the dancing metaphor is insufficient. Nobody ever gets up on stage and tries to tackle a dancer. The dancer never gets choked out by a rival.

For a wrestler, on the other hand, adversity and the unexpected are part and parcel of what they do. Their sport is a battle, just like life. They are fighting an opponent as well as their own limitations, emotions, and training.

Life, like wrestling, requires more than graceful movement. We have to undergo hard training and cultivate and indomitable will to prevail. Philosophy is the steel against which we sharpen that will and strengthen that resolve.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Remember that to change your mind and to follow someone’s correction are consistent with a free will. For the action is yours alone—to fulfill its purpose in keeping with your impulse and judgment, and yes, with your intelligence.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.16

When you set your mind to a task, do you always follow through? It’s an impressive feat if you do. But don’t let yourself become a prisoner of that kind of determination. That asset might become a liability someday.

Conditions change. New facts come in. Circumstances arise. If you can’t adapt to them—if you simply proceed onward, unable to adjust according to this additional information—you are no better than a robot. The point is not to have an iron will, but an adaptable will—a will that makes full use of reason to clarify perception, impulse, and judgment to act effectively for the right purpose.

It’s not weak to change and adapt. Flexibility is its own kind of strength. In fact, this flexibility combined with strength is what will make us resilient and unstoppable.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

Whenever you suffer pain, keep in mind that it’s nothing to be ashamed of and that it can’t degrade your guiding intelligence, nor keep it from acting rationally and for the common good. And in most cases you should be helped by the saying of Epicurus, that pain is never unbearable or unending, so you can remember these limits and not add to them in your imagination. Remember too that many common annoyances are pain in disguise, such as sleepiness, fever and loss of appetite. When they start to get you down, tell yourself you are giving in to pain.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.64

In 1931, on a trip to New York City, Winston Churchill was struck crossing the street by a car going more than thirty miles an hour. A witness at the scene was sure that he had been killed. He would spend some eight days in the hospital, with cracked ribs and a severe head wound.

Churchill somehow retained consciousness. When he spoke to the police, he went to great lengths to insist that he was completely to blame and wanted no harm to come to the driver. Later, the driver came to visit Churchill at the hospital. When Churchill heard that the driver was out of work, he tried to offer him—the man who had nearly killed him—some money. More than his own pain, he was worried that the publicity from the accident would hurt the man’s job prospects and sought to help how he could.

“Nature is merciful,” he later wrote in a newspaper article about the experience, “and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass. It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.”

In the years to come, Churchill and the world would witness some of the most hellish torments that man could invent. Yet he—along with many of our ancestors—endured that pain as well. As horrible as it was, eventually all would be well again. Because like Epicurus says, nothing is unending. You just need to be strong and gracious enough to get through it.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

What if someone despises me? Let them see to it. But I will see to it that I won’t be found doing or saying anything contemptible. What if someone hates me? Let them see to that. But I will see to it that I’m kind and good-natured to all, and prepared to show even the hater where they went wrong. Not in a critical way, or to show off my patience, but genuinely and usefully.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.13

When someone has strong opinion about something, it usually says more about them than whatever or whomever the opinion happens to be about. This is especially true when it comes to resentment and hatred of other people. (It is a sad irony that the prejudiced often harbor secret attractions to those they so publicly hate.)

For this reason, the Stoic does two things when encountering hatred or ill opinion in others. They ask: Is this opinion inside my control? If there is a chance for influence or change, they take it. But if there isn’t, they accept this person as they are (and never hate a hater). Our job is tough enough already. We don’t have time to think about what other people are thinking, even if it’s about us.

* Source: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman