Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

Just about anything could go wrong. It is unwise and wasteful to conflate the merely possible with the probable—or the inevitable.

Live one day in nobility, and you will have accomplished more than ten thousand lives of desperate, quarrelsome, hapless commoners.

The world exists, you have an opportunity to draw breath and participate, and you dare to indulge in self-pity?

Do not invest time and emotional energy imagining calamities that might befall you or your family and friends. Be aware of the possibilities, prepare as best as you are able to avoid needless suffering, loss of life, financial disaster, and the like and, certainly, learn how to respond rationally and efficiently should the need arise. Do not, howev

Kindness within reason is a virtue. Pathological, indiscriminate kindness is a recipe for personal disaster and cultural extinction. Do not gleefully participate in your own destruction.

Secondarily, you must resist the temptation to become frustrated with the stupid, the liars, and the corrupt. This is, perhaps, your greatest challenge. Let them degrade themselves, but do not degrade yourself because of them. Their character is their punishment. It is not your concern.

Focus on understanding the world around you, your place in it, and your duties as a rational and decent human being. The rest is theater. Leave it to the actors.

Spend neither time nor energy debating your detractors.

A body that cannot obey the dictates of the will is nothing more than a corpse that has not yet expired.