Philosophy Can Change a Life

I'm so thrilled at every email from a reader, even those who are determined to convince me I'm wrong about something. But every now and then I get one that says, "You changed my life." With the permission of the writer, I want to share one of those that came to me this week, with exactly that title. I hope this powerful message will nudge you to read some in the Stoic philosophers, whether through my book or someone else’s. The book referred to by my correspondent here, by the way, could be my least known general audience book, and yet I was gratified just today to see a philosopher I greatly respect and admire say that it should have been a top bestseller when it appeared. And there’s an interesting story about that. I always do my best to write books worth reading. I do hope I succeed! Now the email:

Dear Tom,

I read your book, The Stoic Art of Living, back in 2016. My life until that point had been pretty miserable. I suffered from terrible anxiety, depression, 24/7, obtrusive negative thoughts, anger, uncontrollable emotions, and a belief that I was destined to be unhappy.

I was introduced to Stoicism in a philosophy class a few years earlier, but I struggled to sift through the dense philosophical texts. Your book helped me take Stoic wisdom and actually apply it to my life. I remember reading it over and over, finding it so fascinating how each time I read it, a new gem of your wisdom popped out of me which was completely applicable to my current situation.

Over the years, I continued practicing Stoicism and finally overcame each of my struggles. Today, I experience a near-constant sense of happiness and freedom from negative thoughts (really, I have a clear mind free from such thoughts for ~95% of the day). I transformed from a complete pessimist to an eternal optimist. I know how to immediately practice neutrality toward adversity or turn challenges into something to be grateful for. I truly feel like a Stoic.

And now I help other people do the same. I developed an 8-week program where I teach people logic and principles from Stoicism that help them create happiness and change the way they respond to challenges. The methods that I use and have developed make the wisdom stick so it becomes second-nature. The results have been fantastic so far.

I just wanted to reach out and say thank you for changing my life and for the work you do to keep philosophy alive in the modern-day. I think with all of our technological progress, we’ve forgotten some of these basic laws of nature that allow us to create happiness regardless of our genetics, what we learned from the people who raised us, and the difficult experiences we’ve had.Your book had quite the ripple effect, not just on me, but everyone I've worked with who has benefited from the treasures of this ancient philosophy.I would love to hear what you’re up to. Thank you again!

Best Regards,

Kayla Trautwein

www.kaylatrautwein.com

For the book, click HERE.

Bouncing Back

A few years ago, I wrote a book called The Stoic Art of Living, which had the subtitle "Inner Resilience and Outer Results." The more I had read the ancient Roman stoic philosophers on the ups and downs of life, they more I had come to appreciate the quality of resilience as crucial to success in an uncertain world.

In a book called, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, author Andrew Zolli defines this quality as “the ability of people, communities, and systems to maintain their core purpose and integrity among unforeseen shocks and surprises.” I see it as a psychological tendency to bounce back from challenges, difficulties, and obstacles. The resilient person absorbs "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as Hamlet put it, and bounces back with a positive attitude and renewed action toward his or her goals. 

We can cultivate resilience in our lives in many ways. The stoics had mental techniques a couple of thousand years ago that work today as well as they did then. One friend says that when big trees of misfortune fall across his path and block the way forward, he says to himself, "It's time to get out the chainsaw!" A Roman would have thought of his ax. A simple go-to image can make a difference, and turn around your emotions.

One particular ancient image can be helpful here. The debris of difficulty will at times fall like mounds of trash into almost any life. Many will feel smothered and give up. But if your spirit burns brightly enough with the fire of enthusiastic commitment, that debris is just more fuel for the fire. The amount of garbage that could smother a small flame will be consumed by a great one, which will then grow bigger. Difficulty can actually feed your determination. It's most often up to you.

The inertia of resistance typically pushes back against great new things, and creative people. A resilient individual lets this become a badge of honor, and uses it to fuel even greater efforts. So burn brightly, and enjoy the benefits of resilience that can result!

There's hardly anything in this world as satisfying as bouncing back from difficulty, challenge, and adversity, and attaining a level and form of success that can surprise and delight you.

A Christmas Message on Bouncing High

We benefit from people sharing their success stories with us. We want to know: How did it happen? What did they do? Could they predict the process in advance, or were there surprises?

We benefit from people sharing their failure stories with us. We want to know: How did it happen? What did they do? Could they predict the process in advance, or were there surprises?

I've been a student of success for a very long time. And along the way, I've come to grasp the vital importance of understanding failure as a crucial part of any worthwhile adventure. In this world, success is often hard to attain, and failure's easy to stumble into. But what's easy can teach us about what's hard. Rather than being embarrassed about failure, we need to acknowledge it, embrace it, and learn from it. It's the world's most common course for the growth and excellence we all aspire to achieve.

Christmas is, in principle, a holiday in which we Christians celebrate a great experiment, an adventure, really, that seemed to end, thirty-some years after the original Christmas day, in tragic failure. But in that apparent failure, were the seeds of ultimate success. We're told that God, the Source of All, transformed the terrible into the wonderful. And that's how it can go for us, as well.

Wise people have given us some advice about this. They've said: Fail often, fail well, fail forward. Avoid only those failures that would take you out of the game altogether. And, while this, in principle, is great advice, we often overestimate the damage that a certain failure would create, and we shy away from trying. We forget our inner resilience that sometimes only failure reveals.

So, today's advice is simple. Be the little ball that bounces high whenever it hits bottom hard.

Don't fear failure. Fear only a refusal to learn from it and transform it to the success whose seeds it contains.

Merry Christmas.

Success, Failure, and Mastery

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.

- Mizuta Masahide

I just read a deep book on success, failure, and mastery – The Rise, by Sarah Lewis. It begins with that quote, which I love.  My barn has burned down at least a couple of times, and the moon has always given me new light for what I needed to build next.

The Rise is one of those books that you have to read more than once, and ponder, and review. But of course, as C. S. Lewis once said, if a book isn’t worth reading twice, it wasn’t worth reading once.

We live in a time when success is almost defined as celebrity, or status, or excessive wealth. Sarah Lewis helps us to reorient our thinking around the concept of mastery, and the process that develops it. And it’s the process that seems to be her real interest, because the process of growing in mastery of anything inevitably involves uncertainty, courage, failure, persistence, and struggle. We’ve demonized failure, when we should understand that it can actually be one of the higher angels of progress. Lewis tells story after story that show this. It’s hard to feel deep satisfaction in our work, or in our lives, unless we take on difficult challenges and take our lumps as we fight our way forward. Certainly, we should work with joy – that’s something I’ve always urged. But we haven’t really understood joy until we’ve reconciled it with life’s struggles. Otherwise, what we mistake for joy is just a superficial giddiness.  Authentic joy, deep joy, can sustain us in the battles of life, and it is precisely those battles that tear down and take away whatever superficialities are blocking us from the real thing.

Lewis writes about the great masters in any field and how they think about challenge and failure, and then gives it a personal twist when she says: “Many of the things most would avoid, these individuals had turned into an irreplaceable advantage. I still remember a shudder when I sensed a knowing as sure as fact – that I might only truly become my fullest self if I explored and stayed open to moving through daunting terrain.”

Life is supposed to be a series of adventures, and adventures by their very nature can be quite daunting. They involve uncertainty, fear, risk, and often pain. But they also bring our best hope at becoming what we’re capable of being and experiencing the fulfillment that alone accompanies the quest for our own personal forms of success.

Lewis says that, “The pursuit of mastery is an ever onward almost.” The beauty of it is that there is a sense in which it’s never quite attained, in its idealistic perfection. And yet, those whom we rightly call masters are just much farther along the curve, more advanced in their adventures, than is common to see.

She quotes Michelangelo as having prayed, “Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish,” which, in modern times, would strike many as heresy. Aren’t we supposed to accomplish more than we could possibly have desired? Our modern icons and titans of success have surely achieved more than they ever could have dreamed. Isn’t that our model?

The paradox easily melts away, because no one goes to places they haven’t even dreamed unless they’re always hoping and striving and looking for that next adventure, that unexpected opportunity, that one more thing as yet untried. And, in the end, it’s not about celebrity, or status, or financial wealth – it’s about a form of wealth that goes far beyond any of that, and is to be found only in the pursuit of our proper forms of mastery.

I may be writing more about Lewis and her book here at TomVMorris.com in the coming days. I'm still living with it, which is what you should do with a truly good book. Come visit and reflect with me.