Do you know how to face difficulties in life? How would a Stoic approach failure and death?
William B. Irvine says there are three key areas of life where you can apply Stoic strategies for overcoming adversity. Namely, he discusses how to approach failure, falls from high places, and death as a Stoic would.
Here are the three difficult areas of life where you need to embrace your inner Stoic.
1. Approach Failure as an Opportunity to Learn
Irvine suggests that you use the Stoics’ method of reframing to learn how to face difficulties in life. Specifically, he suggests that you reframe failures—which most of us perceive and thereby experience as adverse events—as learning opportunities.
If you never acknowledge your mistakes and failures, Irvine argues, you’ll never learn anything. This is because our failures show us exactly what we did wrong and, in this way, suggest what we need to do differently to improve the next time around. Failure, then, is profoundly useful. In fact, it’s a core ingredient of success. According to Irvine, anyone who achieves anything of note does so not in spite of failure, but because they learn from their failures. This is true of world-class athletes, entrepreneurs who change the world, parents who raise good humans, professional musicians, and anyone else who’s succeeded.
| Learning Derives From Failure Much as Irvine discusses above, Matthew Syed argues throughout Black Box Thinking that failure is the key ingredient in learning and that it drives human progress on both the personal and systemic levels. Like Irvine, he says that examining our failures reveals the gap between our knowledge and reality—for instance, reviewing a poorly shot arrow can tell you much about how to improve your form and hit the target. Or, reflecting on a botched business presentation (not to mention getting feedback) will help you do better next time. This may seem obvious, but it’s easier said than done. Both Irvine and Syed agree that to make better use of failure, we need to change our mindsets. Practical strategies to achieve this include meditation, which can help you stay calmer when you mess up, and noting positives that have resulted from past failures. |
Irvine recommends that to embrace failure, you should break your goals into actionable steps and anticipatable obstacles. Then, take action, make mistakes, learn from them, and push ahead. You’ll either succeed or fall short having learned a lot. And if you fail, don’t worry—it’s better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all. (Shortform note: Beyond simply taking action, Robert Greene argues that you can more effectively learn by engaging in hands-on practice: Find a mentor or guide, then commit to following that person’s lead, building momentum, and staying the course.)
2. Approach the Loss of Good Fortune With Grace and Humility
Next, Irvine turns to what he calls a particularly pernicious form of adversity—when things are going well, you’re high on success and good fortune, and then suddenly everything takes a catastrophic turn.
The Stoics noticed this phenomenon and would practice humility as a way to allay the risk of such catastrophic reversals of fortune. According to Irvine, any extended period of good fortune tends to lead into a particularly brutal or unexpected misfortune. To avoid this, he recommends that you do as the Stoics did: Take good fortune in stride and stay humble. More specifically, enjoy it without announcing your joy to the world. Doing so can attract envy; and envious peers, Irvine says, are the most common source of reversals of fortune. Such people will try to sabotage or ruin your good times, like a workplace colleague who’s jealous of your recent promotion.
(Shortform note: The Stoics might’ve derived this principle from the tale of Icarus, an ancient Greek myth about a boy who, wearing wax wings, flew too close to the sun and fell to his death. Some interpret this myth as a story about power and the hubris it can create in those who aren’t ready to wield it. For instance, a young executive handed his career on a silver platter—someone who carries all the overconfidence his circumstances produce in him—will inevitably draw the ire of colleagues and direct reports who worked hard to be where they are. Noting this, one practical way to find humility in the face of good fortune is to attribute it largely to luck, which can reduce your possible self-aggrandizement and defuse others’ envy.)
3. Approach Death as the Final Stoic Test
Last, Irvine turns his attention to how the Stoics approached death. He says that today, we typically ignore the reality of death. We sweep it under the rug or operate on naive childhood understandings of death as leading to a happy afterlife. And because we ignore our inevitable deaths, we never realize the true value of our lives.
According to Irvine, the Stoics related to death differently. First, they actively practiced acknowledging human mortality in order to better appreciate their lives in the present. They did this with a variety of techniques that involve briefly thinking about worst-case scenarios. This makes use of the anchoring effect, a psychological phenomenon wherein priming yourself with a reference point helps you see something in a new light. The Stoics’ techniques include:
- Realizing that this could be the last time you’re doing something—be it cooking a meal, hugging your best friend, or sitting down to work.
- Contemplating that someday in the future, you’ll likely wish you could return to this present moment—to an old and enfeebled version of yourself, earlier life could seem a wonderland.
Both of these techniques help you candidly see the reality of your eventual death and thereby appreciate your life more now. This may seem paradoxical, but knowing deeply that you’ll one day die can bring you more fully into living your life today.
