Discipline of Assent

What really matters is not the event itself, but instead how you think about the event. Your mind is your most powerful tool, but often it is also the reason of your troubles.

The discipline of action is all about thinking the right thoughts and using reason to guide you.

Your mind can fail you at many important points. Let’s illustrate this with a few examples.

Imagine that you are riding a bike and a car drives dangerously close to you, almost hitting you.

Your instincts take over and you swerve hard in order to avoid a collision. What often happens in an incident like this is that you will start cussing out the driver, making rude gestures and lose your cool.

There are emotions at play here at different points. First, your emotions alerted you to danger and you reacted quick in order to avoid it.

This is the correct use of emotions. However what happened next right after you managed to avoid the accident is that other emotions took over and made you angry.

This is the incorrect use of emotions. Think about it. What is the use of being angry at this point?

The danger to your life is passed. The only thing that you are doing is venting your frustration, which not only serves no purpose, but could even be counterproductive as it makes you more agitated and more prone to an accident.

Instead what you should have done is assented to the first emotion that saved your life, but not assented to the second one.

Imagine another common situation. You are having an argument. Your opponent hits you with some facts which destroy your argument. His position is correct. Yours isn’t.

However instead of reconsidering your position based on these new facts, you just start repeating your illogical talking points louder and louder.

What is happening here is that you have fallen for a cognitive bias. Your ego is at stake and instead of acknowledging the validity of the other side’s arguments, you fear a loss of status on your side and instead buckle down and start wailing about incessantly.

Thinking according to Nature

For the Stoics, the biggest part of living according to Nature was using your head. You need to be able to rise above your imperfections and instead use your ability to reason.

According to current research, there are two ways of thinking that humans engage in. Daniel Kahnemann, psychologist and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, calls this System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is fast and intuitive. It is based on your emotions. System 2 is slow and deliberate. It is based on reason.

Both have their place. System 1 is good for situations which require an immediate action, such as in dangerous situations as given in the first example.

However, this type of thinking is often hijacked and can lead to cognitive biases.

What you should do instead is to take a step back and engage in System 2 thinking. Thinking out things rationally and critically. This can often lead to much better solutions and actions.

Take control of your emotions

However how do you do that? This is often very hard, since emotions have a way of creeping up on you.

When you feel your emotions are starting to get the best of you, you need to have a couple of techniques under your belt in order to regain control.

One of these is distancing.

There are two kinds of distancing: physical and mental.

For me, the best way to diffuse an emotionally charged situation is to just walk away. If you feel like you are getting into a heated argument, just walk out the door.

I have done that a few times, and immediately your head cools down and the emotions start fading.

However sometimes physical distancing is not feasible, so you will have to use some mental distancing techniques. This means stop and count to 10. Or stop and recite the alphabet in your head!

Be aware of your value judgments

A value judgment is your opinion of a particular situation. Usually people judge situations as being “good” or “bad” or any other type of adjectives.

Let’s go back to the bike situation above. Why did you get mad at the driver of that car that almost hit you?

Since you judged that situation as “bad”.

However is there really any advantage to making this judgment? No. This type of judgment is really irrelevant to the situation.

You cannot change the fact that a car almost hit you. That is a done thing. It happened. Get over it.

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Discipline of Action

Above all else, Marcus Aurelius was a man of action. Unlike most people, his day did not end by reading the flowery words of philosopher-gurus and motivational quotes.

Instead he tried to put all these lessons into practice. In the ancient world, you became a philosopher not by reading, but by living.

The discipline of action was one of the three disciplines that the Roman Stoics thought were fundamental for living a worthy life. It was about taking the right actions for the right reasons.

While the discipline of desire is about what you should want, the discipline of action is about what you should do.

You need to have a purpose

You probably have several roles that you play in real life. These might be tied to your family, your job, or your personal pursuits.

Go ahead and write down the roles that you have. Make a list and then think about what you want to achieve by playing each of these roles and what duties stem from this. What is your purpose for each of them?

The list of these roles should form a fundamental part of the crafting of the overall vision for yourself for now and for the future.

They can also help you to find a purpose. There are different types of purposes: you can have one grand purpose for life, or smaller purposes based on your roles, or even ones based on actions. What is important is that all your actions are done with a purpose in mind.

Having a purpose is the basis of intrinsic motivation. This type of motivation has been shown to be the key to your ability to achieve your goals.

It helps if the vision you create is written on paper. This will make it much more likely for you to carry it out. It won’t be just an abstract concept in your head, but something concrete.

Having something concrete in front of you, a vision that you can always return to, can serve as a powerful incentive and help you in your drive.

The vision should include your:

1) roles

2) values

3) goals

The vision will serve as your guiding document, but the Stoics were all about living in the present. The past is the past and cannot be changed and the future is unknowable. You do not have control over your past or your future, only your present.

That’s why it is crucial that you take action now. Forget about the past, and stop waiting for the perfect moment in the future. Start doing things now. However how do you achieve your vision by doing this?

The key here is to take things action by action. The vision contains the big goals, but you need to break them down into mini-goals, a series of steps to get you to where you want to go.

Take things action by action

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Discipline of Desire (Will)

What can you control?

People frequently worry about things that they cannot control. This is often the biggest sources of anxiety and unhappiness for most people.

In order to lessen this anxiety, you need to start dividing things into 3 categories: things you can control, things you can partially control, and things you cannot control.

Whenever you are faced with a problem, ask yourself this question: What can I control?

Based on the answer to this question, you can apply a simple formula.

1) For things you can control: change them up.

2) For things you can partially control: define which parts you can control, work on them, and forget about the rest.

3) For things you cannot control: forget about them.

You are stuck in traffic, there is an accident, and it is raining. You are late for work.

Which things can you control here?

You did everything as you usually do. You got up, did your morning routine and then took the car at the same time as you always do. You are usually at work on time.

This means that the fact that you are late is beyond your control. You cannot control the fact that there was an accident or it is raining. So don’t worry about it.

The only thing that you can change up for the future is maybe to consider taking public transportation.

Another exercise that you can do is to come up with the worst case scenario and prepare yourself for it. This is what the Stoics used to do. They would often imagine really drastic situations (like death) and start mentally preparing themselves for it.

You don’t even need to be that extreme. These types of extreme situations are very unlikely to happen. You can instead just prepare yourself for the realistic worst case scenario.

You are late for work? What is the worst case scenario that could happen here? You could get fired.

Is that realistic? No, not very. The most likely worst case scenario is that the boss will just look at you funny.

For any type of situation, ask yourself these two questions: What is the worst thing that could happen here? Is this scenario realistic?

Examining a situation from this perspective can have a really calming effect, so do this whenever you feel anxious or stressed. You will realize that often you have these feelings for no reason.

Focus internally.

One aspect of focusing on things that you can control is that while you can’t control what others think or do, you can to a large extent control what you yourself think and do.

That’s the reason why the Stoics focused internally. You should be your own judge of the value of what you do and create. Don’t let others be the ones who determine that.

That is why having intrinsic motivation is key if you want to achieve goals and have a happy life. You need to be internally driven, if you want to have complete control over your actions and reactions.

That is usually not the case. Many people are driven by external things like fame, money or other externalities. The problem is that these things are outside your control to a large extent (besides the fact that seeking fame as the goal of your existence is pretty vain), and that’s why focusing on them can cause a lot of unhappiness.

So how do you make intrinsic motivation a part of your system?

The first thing that you should do is to convince yourself how silly and vain some of these external pursuits are. Marcus Aurelius would often try to look at the big picture. Once you take things from a wider perspective, you will see how insignificant these things really are.

This type of an internal focus is at the basis of the discipline of desire. Realistically, you can only affect a limited amount of things, so your desire should be limited to these things. You need to want things that you can realistically get.

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