Listened to well known author of books of Stoicism, Ryan Holiday and Shane Parrish's The Knowledge Project podcast. Here's a quick summary on stoicism as articulated by Ryan.
Key Teaching of Stoicism
- The primary task of stoicism the dichotomy of control - understanding the distinction between what upto us and what is not upto us. Any energy spent on stuff not upto us is wasted and what we primarily control are our thoughts, opinions and actions. (Epictetus)
- We don't control what happens, we control how we respond.
- Everything that happens is an opportunity to practice a virtue. (Markus Aurelis)
Stoics are embracing both their powerfulness and powerlessness at the same time and fusing it together and deciding where we have agency, where we don't and what are we going to do with the agency.
The four stoic virtues
- Courage: Putting yourself on the line literally or figuratively
- Temperance/Self-discipline: The standards to which you hold yourself. Not what you "can" do or not what is "legal", but what you choose
- Justice: The golden rule - treating people the way you want to be treated, honest, respect, decency, what is the right thing to do.
- Wisdom: Not just the pursuit of knowledge or understanding, but the intuitive sense of how much courage, temperance or what is the right thing etc. This virtue unlocks the other virtues and is more about when and how to use the other virtues.
Here is the full podcast.
