Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Just because someone has anxieties or self-doubts or was taught the wrong things early in life doesn’t mean they can’t become something great, provided they have the courage (and the mentors) to help them change. With Crates’s tough love, Zeno overcame his self-consciousness to become who he was called to be.

Cicero once said that to philosophize is to learn how to die. So the Stoics instruct us wisely not only in how to live, but in how to face the scariest part of life: the end. They teach us, by example, the art of going out well.

It was Seneca, a Stoic philosopher of the Roman era, far removed from the academy, who would say quite bluntly that there was no other purpose to reading and study if not to live a happy life.

Its four virtues are simple and straightforward: Courage. Temperance.

There is no better definition of a Stoic: to have but not want, to enjoy without needing.

The only reason to study philosophy is to become a better person. Anything else, as Nietzsche said, is merely a “critique of words by means of other words.”

Anything you do well is noble, no matter how humble. And possibly even more admirable if you deliberately forgo status in the pursuit of what you really love.

“The goal of life is to live in harmony with nature,” we are told he wrote in On Human Nature, “which means to live according to virtue, because nature leads us to virtue.”

The Stoics would have never argued that life was fair or that losing someone didn’t hurt. But they believed that to despair, to tear ourselves apart in bereavement, was not only an affront to the memory of the person we loved, but a betrayal of the living who still needed us.

The word “stoic” in English means the unemotional endurance of pain.

One of the central beliefs of Stoicism is the idea that history is cyclical. That the same thing happens again and again and again. We are not so special, they would say. We are interchangeable pieces, role players in a play that has been playing since the beginning of time.

You can and should be interested in everything, the Stoics taught, because you can and should learn wisdom from everything. The more you experience, the more you learn, and, paradoxically, the more humbled you are by the endless amounts of knowledge that remain in front of you.

“Best,” to the Stoics, did not meaning winning battles. Superior did not mean accumulating the most honors. It meant, as it still does today, virtue. It meant excellence not in accomplishing external things—though that was always nice if fate allowed—but excellence in the areas that you controlled: Your thoughts. Your actions. Your choices.

Now this force and strength, when it is in things apparent and to be persisted in, is wisdom; when in things to be endured, it is fortitude; when about worthiness, it is justice; and when about choosing or refusing, it is temperance.

“Well-being is realized by small steps,” he would say, looking back, “but is truly no small thing.”

We must focus on the task at hand, and waste not a moment on the tasks that are not ours. We must have courage. We must be fair. We must check our emotions. We must, above all, be wise.

His dictum in life and in leadership was simple and straightforward: “Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.” No better expression or embodiment of Stoicism is found in his line (and his living of that line) than: “Waste no more time talking about what a good man is like.

To Zeno, the purpose of philosophy, of virtue, was to find “a smooth flow of life,” to get to a place where everything we do is in “harmonious accord with each man’s guiding spirit and the will of the one who governs the universe.” To the Greeks, each of us had a daimon, an inner genius or guiding purpose that is connected to the universal nature. Those who live by keeping the individual and universal natures in agreement are happy, Zeno said, and those who don’t are not.

This is the Stoic way.

A Stoic does the job that needs to be done. They don’t care about credit.