Happy New Year!
A resolution
“You have a moral obligation to become rational.” — Charlie Munger, 1924-2023
Today’s post is philosophical. It is about Stoicism. It’s also very lightly-edited so forgive any grammatical errors.
(Admittedly Stoicism has become kind of a fad in the last 2-3 years, but I think it’s of value. In the same way that exercise fads come and go, but exercising itself is unquestionably beneficial.)
Know: everything below is practical. I’m not a fan of meandering philosophy that doesn’t end with actionable ideas.1
The ideas here have been my “Every Year’s Resolution” for a while now. I have been trying to practice them in my life, although I often feel I have a long way to go. They can be difficult and unintuitive for many of us until you really think about them and hammer them in. Each of us has a different starting point, too. Buddhists will tell you meditation is very easy for some people, and incredibly difficult for others. Practicing some of Stoicism’s ideas is like that.
Nonetheless, I think they are useful to absolutely anybody. I hope you find actionable ideas here. I hope they let you improve upon yourself; and in so doing, improve the world.
A couple people have asked me for books. Here are a few on this topic. They’re short and cheap to buy. There are even PDFs floating around and free audiobook versions on YouTube, since both authors are long dead and their work has been translated and reproduced many times.
Meditations, by Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
The Enchiridion, by the Greek philosopher Epictetus
Letters on Ethics (more complete) or Letters from a Stoic (less complete), by Lucius Annaeus Seneca
These works are two millennia old. BUT! If you read them, you’ll find they’re loaded with practical wisdom on how to navigate life. It’s all timeless, and clearly applicable to modern life.
(And boy, do I love knowledge with a long half-life. Something I learn once at age 25 and can use over and over again until age 85 because of how broadly applicable it is? Sign me up!)
(Also, I have an actual book list going. About investing and such. You guys wanted some of those too. I’ll try to get that out at some point.)
Marcus Aurelius didn’t set out to write a book for us. He was simply writing his journal. “Things unto himself.” He reflected on how best to think and what to do in different situations. He didn’t even want it published; some unknown souls preserved and organized his works.
I find it all useful because it is a school of thought created by practitioners who wanted to address real-world problems in effective ways. Marcus Aurelius ruled one of the greatest empires of his age as both a head administrator and military commander. Seneca was a successful statesman and politician. Epictetus was a Greek slave and secretary, owned by one of Emperor Nero’s key secretaries; he was later freed and founded a school in Greece. Arrian of Nicomedia studied under Epictetus and later was appointed Senator, Consul, then Prefect (governor) of Cappadocia by Emperor Hadrian. In that last position, he fended off a foreign invasion. Stoicism was not dreamed up by people in ivory towers who never experienced the real world, suffered real hardship, found real success for themselves, and helped/led others.
Even Zeno, who is credited with founding Stoicism, was a practitioner of life. Zeno was a wealthy Greek merchant and trader. One day, his ship full of cargo was wrecked in a storm. Maritime insurance wasn’t much a thing in his day, so he lost most of his fortune. He was also aboard. He barely survived, washing up on Greek shores with nothing.
He spoke with people and thinkers and such where he landed, and had a profound epiphany. This led him to never look back and feel regret or loss about his fortune. That epiphany is our topic, and that epiphany is why Zeno’s best days were after the loss of everything he had.
Finally, Stoic philosophy is based on evidence and anchored in reality. There is no woo-woo (I hate woo-woo). The authors observed things for themselves, formed ideas, and tried to test and practice everything. Everything they wrote is testable and replicable today, by any of us. We can do and think as they did, and decide what’s real or what’s BS.
None of these people even believed they were special or that there was anything magical about themselves. Even Marcus Aurelius didn’t really think he was special. He held the deterministic view that this was the role he was supposed to play in life; he often points this out in his journal. Therefore, they believed Stoic ideas are valid and useful for anybody.
This practicality and this universality arguably make Stoicism the most non-bullshit philosophy ever put to paper, and probably one of the most powerful.
Control and Autonomy
Stoicism’s main tenet is the same as the one Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, reached 700 years earlier, halfway around the planet, in a different society. They used different words and thought a little differently, but their idea is functionally the same.
We must learn to distinguish what is in our control, and what is not in our control.
Everything outside us is outside our control. Everything within our mind is within our control.
That is: we cannot choose what happens in the world. We can only choose our response.
To incorrectly believe that anything outside our control — outside us — controls us, is a dangerous mistake. In doing so, we give away our power. Our autonomy. Our ability to act. We doom ourselves to suffer and to stay stuck.
Zeno lost everything but his life. Yet, eventually, he chose not to see it this way. He chose to believe what happened does not define him, or his state of mind.
Zeno realized:
Both incredibly wonderful and incredibly horrible things happen to us. We have no more power over these things than we do over the sunrise or sunset.
It is also often the case that wonders turn into curses, and travesties turn into opportunities. That’s because the world is a very complex place that is also ever-changing. It’s never static, and a wide variety of unpredictable things can happen.
Hence, there’s no point conditioning our happiness on some short-lived wonder, or our pain on some short-lived tragedy.2 Instead, we should look inside ourselves and focus on our own attitude internally, then let this guide our actions. You could say these are similar to Right Thought and Right action in Buddhism’s Eightfold Path.
I think that had Zeno never been wrecked, he would never have learned how to better live his life.
Think about it a different way. This’ll sound nihilistic, but it’s not.
There is no inherent meaning to life or do anything. Yet that’s a good thing. All the “meaning” that things have are the meaning that we, people, ascribed to them. It is a story. Just a story. Yet, this also means we can chose to build and believe a different narrative. When the narratives we have about ourselves or about the world are not useful to helping us move forward in life, we can ditch them for ones that are. (All we have to do is hold our opinions — our stories — lightly, so that we can let them go easily.)
Say you choose to have the beliefs like: no matter what, you can do something. Or: no matter what, you can learn, change, and adapt. If this is the belief system you choose — if this is the story — then you will have thoughts aligned with that. You will think about how to overcome obstacles. You will not think about how crappy your lot in life is. You will have thoughts and actions aligned with the belief that you have control over yourself.
By contrast, if you choose to believe that the world controls you, then you have no power over yourself — no autonomy — and you’re at the whims of whatever happens, then you’ll never act under your own agency. And it’s because you believe there’s no point.
(For example, personally, I choose to believe my body can become stronger and healthier. We have a huge body of medical evidence, evolutionary biology knowledge, and weightlifting/coaching history to support that belief. When you pick up very heavy things and put them down, correctly and repeatedly, the body adapts. Your muscles and tendons gain strength. Your bone density increases. Your central nervous system becomes more efficient. Your heart stays healthy. So does your metabolic system. And so on. So I choose to exercise as a result of this story, because anything else doesn’t make sense. When I started powerlifting, I deadlifted 95 lbs. The other day, I deadlifted 310 lbs. My goal long ago was 315. It’s arbitrary. It’s just because it looks cool: it’s exactly 3 plates on each side of the barbell.)
Now, obviously, the caveat here is that you have to have beliefs — craft a story — aligned with reality and with useful objectives. If you choose to believe in aliens, you will waste a lot of time watching conspiracy documentaries. You’ll also fall in with other people who have these beliefs, and you’ll stay stuck together. Worse yet, you will feel good about this because you’re in the comfort of a tribe of like-minded crazy people all stuck in an echo chamber together. If you just avoid that pitfall, though, you’ll be fine.
Both Buddhism and Stoicism teach us to go about rooting out silly beliefs and replacing them with useful ones.
(By the way, cognitive behavioral therapy has become popular in the last 20 years. It’s now one of the main tools psychologists use in their practice today. It is basically the same as the Stoics’ and the Buddha’s ideas. You have to realize only you control you, and you don’t control anything outside you. And then you have to rid yourself of useless beliefs and replace them with useful beliefs.)
Furthermore, by focusing on ourselves — the only thing we can control — we inadvertently become better contributors to society in the process, and earn others’ respect, too. If you are a firefighter and you believe “if I go to the gym and follow a good program, I will become stronger”, then you’ll go to the gym (which some of us learn to enjoy!) and you’ll become stronger. Then you be a more able-bodied firefighter when it counts: when you have to carry equipment around in a burning building, and haul people out to safety.
We can make the outside world better, but we first have to recognize the only thing we really can control… is ourselves. We have to spend our time working on us.
Take another example: you have a jerk for a boss. They don’t like you. You are bored at work and know you’re capable of something more/different. You can see that if you were promoted, you could have a bigger impact on the organization. Yet you feel that you can’t get there because your boss stands in the way. You boss isn’t going to change. You know that, so you give up. You decide this is all you’ll get. What just happened? You let the external circumstances dictate your beliefs and then dictate your actions. You gave away your autonomy. To some jerk, nonetheless. Really, though: you feel powerless because you decided to be powerless.
Dude, screw that boss, first of all. Second of all, how would you treat another human being in this situation? Would you say: you are screwed! Or would you try and brainstorm with them how to solve this issue? And clearly, there are tons of solutions. Maybe network with another senior manager at the company and try to get transferred over to their group, where you can have an impact. Maybe look for work at a different company where you could do what you think you’re capable of. Maybe just go over this guy’s head one day and speak to their boss, and point out what’s really going on with this team and how its holding the organization back. We think barriers exist, but it’s we who willed those barriers into reality. We can let the barriers evaporate just the same, because they were never real in the first place.
Again: we can’t control what happens externally, such as things other people think, say and do. But we can control how we think or feel internally, and we can control our response.
In the modern West, we get this wrong a lot. When we mix up what we can and can’t control, it pulls us off our paths. It prevents us from achieving anything for ourselves, reaching our potential, and contributing what we have to offer the world. It even stops many of us cold and causes us to give up. We wouldn’t do this to a friend or a loved one, so we shouldn’t do this to ourselves.
Self-Respect and Self-Confidence
“The reason I am qualified to get up here and give this talk to you today is because I have a black belt in Chutzpah.” — Charlie Munger
Many of you know Charlie Munger was a successful investor. You might not know that in mid-life, he became a practicing Stoic. You may not know that around 30 years old, Munger’s life was flipped upside-down.
His first wife turned out to be a gold digger who only wanted him for the success he was beginning to have, and they divorced. He’d loved her. A year later, Munger lost his first son, Teddy, to leukemia. Teddy was 9 years old. To save him, Munger went to every doctor he could. Each night, after visiting the hospital, he wandered the streets of Pasadena and Los Angeles, crying in anguish while Teddy slipped away from him. Ultimately, there was nothing Munger could do. It wasn’t in his control.
Around this time, Munger also lost a lot of his money in a speculative real estate investment.3 He was not doing well.
Later, in his 50s, Munger developed cataracts and was going blind. Rather than complain, he began to learn Braille in preparation for his blindness. He underwent cataract surgery, but it went awry and one of his eyes needed to be removed. He learned that 95% of such surgeries succeed. He accepted that he was one of the 5% where something went wrong, and he never blamed the surgeon.
In 2007, aged 83, Munger said:
“… life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows. Doesn’t matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And there I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something and your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion.”
Around the same time in another interview, he re-iterated:
“If some flickering idea like [self-pity] ever came to me, I’d get rid of it quickly. I don’t like any feeling of being victimized; I think that’s a counter-productive way to think as a human being. I am not a victim. I’m a survivor.”
What’s really going on here? Munger chose to see his hardships as an opportunity to cultivate self-respect and self-confidence. I’m sure he realized that if he were his own friend — a real friend — he would not give them a comforting lie such as “yeah, the world is just crap.” He’d say “you have the power to surpass this, and you will.”
Munger chose to respect himself. He chose to treat his mind with respect and compassion. He also chose to believe in himself, and to therefore develop self-confidence. He then acted accordingly.
In so doing, he turned obstacles into wins.
Marcus Aurelius said something similar in Meditations: “The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Is this not a better way to live?
Think about it for 2025. And every year thereafter.
Happy New Year
— Chris
Afterthought:
I used to watch video game streams and tournaments. One professional-gamer-turned-streamer-YouTuber-and-commentator, Day9 (Sean Plott), made a video once about optimal gameplay. The video is actually a profound conclusion about life.
In high-level play of any sport or game, be it chess, StarCraft, football, etc., there is usually an established “meta-game.” That is: (a) certain strategies and tactics are just better than others, and (b) people eventually figure out what the good ones and the bad ones are, so (c) the good strategies are much more common than the bad ones. In chess, moving the E pawn to e4 is a great first move for white. Moving the A pawn to A4 is a stupid first move. So 1. e4 is played a lot. 1. a4, not so much.
Sometimes, elite players will purposely do something sub-optimal to psyche out the opponent and throw them off balance. They’ll play a bad strategy because it’s not common; therefore, the opponent might not know how to respond, meaning you can trick them. Mikhail Tal, a chess grandmaster and the 1960 world champion, was widely known to be a maestro at this. Tal won a lot of his games this way. The man he defeated in the 1960 finals, Mikhail Botvinnik, was a by-the-books kind of guy who played a tight game and slowly ground down your position. Tal simply flipped the script whenever he could, often by inserting some insane move in the mid-game. Tal once said, “you must take your opponent into a deep, dark forest where 2+2=5, and the way out is only wide enough for one.”
(Tal is one of my favorite second-level thinkers. I love this kind of person, who both (a) know the game inside and out, but also (b) know how other people think about the game, and so (c) can really bend reality and send people into the Twilight Zone. The really good ones are practically sorcerers at this craft. Another one is Miyamoto Musashi, a legendary Ronin and undefeated duelist who lived during Japan’s Sengoku Period; in one fight, he fought a really traditional samurai on an island. The duel was to be at sunrise. The warrior class at the time valued punctuality, so Musashi rowed his boat to the island at noon. That really pissed the guy off. Musashi surprised him with an abrupt attack while he was angry, and killed him with the oar off his rowboat. Musashi and Tal would have liked each other. By the way, Miyamoto Musashi has one of the best life stories you’ve ever read. Read Go Rin No Sho: The Book of Five Rings. It’s like The Art of War by Sun Tzu, except with biographical elements.)
Day9 was commentating a game where a high-level player was getting “cheesed” by a really silly strategy their opponent was using. But the player was so tilted by it, he couldn’t think straight. Day9 pointed out that when someone does this and plays sub-optimally, you should just stick to what works and “Just attack. Just go f***ing kill them.” This works because you are already using a good strategy, while the other guy is using a dumb strategy in disguise, and that strategy is leaving them in a weak position. If the other guy’s strategy was actually good, more people would already be doing it. Yet they’re not. So just attack.
When we later had computer-based chess engines to evaluate positions, skilled players evaluated Tal’s games. They looked at the games where he’d won a game after making an infamous “Tal Move”, like sacrificing a bishop for a pawn for no obvious reason than the fact it “felt correct and could create an attack” according to Tal. The engines nearly always calculated that Tal was in a losing position when he did so. All the other guy had to do was play properly.
In life, we sometimes get psyched out by obstacles. We “see ghosts” where there are none. Some of us freeze as a result, even though we know what we are supposed to do. That we can win if we just push onward regardless.
I’m still a bit of a gamer these days. In a game I play, the stakes are very high. When you die, you lose all your stuff. And you don’t respawn to come back into the fight. It simulates real-life engagements. You do come back, but you have to re-acquire and re-build what you lost, which takes more time than the fighting does. Often, people are told to “die quietly” in the voice chat, because players will get really upset about losing everything and not even being able to finish the fight with friends.
This leaves most of the people in the game extremely risk-averse. Many players actually describe getting “the shakes” in combat, and that this doesn’t happen to them in other games. It’s because they lose everything when they die, which is quite painful. Many of the people therefore just avoid combat. They will often run away when you try to engage them. Or, when you do engage them, they’ll use risk-averse tactics to avoid dying and losing, rather than tactics to try and win. (By the way, this has been observed in real life combat. E.g., in WWI, soldiers were studied and it was found they often fired randomly from the trenches, over the heads of the enemy, then got back into cover. They wanted to not die. And many didn’t want to kill human beings. They care a lot more about survival and conscience than about winning the war for the army or the country. Which is perfectly reasonable if you think about it from any individual’s point of view, rather than the army’s — the commanders’ — point of view. If I remember… the commanders figured this out when looking into how ammunition was spent. It makes perfect sense that we don’t want to die.)
In my game, there’s a very high-level player who often says, “usually, the fight goes to the more aggressive side.”
This behavior — the survival instinct — is why. In the modern world, our brain’s survival instinct still kicks in when we are stressed. Yet, in the modern world, most of us are almost never in life-or-death situations. There’s no real risk of harm. There is no reason to get the shakes in a video game. But we do.
It can be unlearned and replaced.
I am not very good at chess, but sometimes, when I am attacked, I simply attack back rather than try only to defend. My opponent is now stuck “playing chicken.” Will they blink first? Do they have the capacity to deal with the stress of the situation I created, since they now have to attack and defend at the same time? Meanwhile, I am not stressed out. I could lose, but I’m not going to die. It’s just a game of chess. So I’ll take a play out of Tal’s book and walk someone into what will be a stressful game for them, and a fun game for me.
In our video game, my buddies and I do the same. We tend to “play aggro.” We often beat a lot of people with silly strategies simply because we lean in hard. We know people tend to behave as above, so we press our thumbs into their open wounds, and make them feel it. We leverage other people’s risk-averse behavior against them. We can push them around and dictate the field as a result. My buddy and I are usually the “fleet commanders”, the guys in charge4, watching the field, shouting orders, planning the tactics, etc., because we’ve been playing a couple years now, have long-since unlearned the problem, and don’t get “the shakes.”
Sometimes in life, you need to lean in when your instinct is to turtle up and hide/defend. If we’re just a little smart, creative, and self-aware, like above, we have the power to pluck advantage out of thin air and steal a win.
This kind of thing often gets us passed the obstacles we think we face. It is because the obstacles are not real. You — your limiting beliefs and your behaviors — were the obstacle.
But, again, as Marcus Aurelius pointed out: “The obstacle is the way.”
Or as Day9 eloquently said, just f***ing attack.
Back to Stoicism. It is within our control to remove unhelpful beliefs. Or unhelpful feelings that tell us to run and hide. It is within our control to replace them with useful beliefs. And it is within our control to lean in, make a play, and attack. This dissolves illusory obstacles. And often produces wins that don’t make sense to a lot of people.
I’m very cerebral, and I love theories and frameworks. However, I dislike impractical knowledge more with each passing year. It’s probably why — before investing — I chose to pursue engineering instead of physics or mathematics. What is the point to filling your mind with loads of content and frameworks that don’t map to the real world and can’t be put to good use? Or where’ there’s no clear evidence as to why they should work? Of what value is that?
Some Stoics went so far as to say things like “If you have a loved one, you should love them, yet say to yourself: one day, this person will die. In that way, you will feel less harmed when it inevitably happens.”
After leaving his law practice, but before he started his investment partnership and later his partnership with Warren Buffett, he’d gone into real estate development.
Weird, because I’m an introvert. But not weird, because I happen to have a good dose of self-confidence. Sometimes arrogance.
Happy New Year.